Madrid, January 13 (EFE) – LaLiga president Javier Tebas maintained that he will again try to have a match played in Miami (USA) and asserted that “the players’ union should roll out the red carpet for LaLiga,” since 70% of the sale of audiovisual rights goes to their salaries, despite the players’ protests.
“We earn 2 billion euros from audiovisual rights; sometimes people think it’s a windfall. Our players’ union should roll out the red carpet for LaLiga every time they see us, because 70% of what we sell in audiovisual rights goes to their salaries. We’re the ones who do the most to ensure they earn more,” he said at a Europa Press breakfast.
Tebas considered the reaction to LaLiga’s attempt to move the Villarreal-Barcelona match last December to Miami (USA) “to boost brand awareness” unfair, and opined that “freedom of expression can be exercised in other ways.”
“What I want to know is whether stopping a match for 15 seconds is a violation of labor laws because it worries me. We’re subjected to having matches stopped for 15 seconds, 20, or 30 minutes under the guise of freedom of expression. These kinds of rights are requested five days in advance. I didn’t believe the strike because they didn’t request it according to the rules,” he added.
The LaLiga president sees little difference between a Spanish League match being played in Miami and an NFL game being held in Madrid, as happened last year.
“We think it’s great that the NFL is coming, we support it, but we think we’re unbelievable. We’ve become so Americanized, and for us to be told no just because we wanted to hold a game there—we had so much work done because there are so many Spanish fans—we’ve become purists, like cloistered nuns. The European commissioner said nothing can leave here, but now the NBA comes, revolutionizes basketball, creates a competition, is going to sell the franchise for a billion dollars—let’s see how they’re going to pay for it, including Real Madrid and Barcelona,” he questioned.
Tebas argued that moving the game to Miami did not constitute any kind of distortion of the competition. “If we start talking about distortion, it would be better if we all played at the same time, if the big teams had less TV revenue so the rest could have more… where do we draw the line at distortion?” he insisted.
(c) EFE News Agency
