Javier Tebas, the Leader of the League: one, big and censored

What was seen (or rather, what was not seen) was a master class in audiovisual manipulation.

First, the blackout. Not a shot of the immobile players, not a single microphone that picked up the chants that thundered in all the stadiums (that cry of “Thebes, go now!” that LaLiga turned into digital silence).

Then, the corrected and indoctrinated version. Above the gesture of protest, a heavenly label (“Commitment to peace”) that sought to whitewash dissent.

A double censorship. The one with the whip and the one with the perfume.

In republican Rome there was a censor, a magistrate who ensured public morality and punished vices.

Twenty-two centuries later, LaLiga has resurrected the figure. And he has a first and last name: Javier Tebas Medrano. The new censor no longer passes the list of citizens, but of plans. It does not examine behaviors, but cameras. Decide which image is “acceptable” and which should be deleted.

First, total censorship. The players’ protest evaporated from the map, as if it had never existed.

“An old trick of authoritarian power: when you can’t eliminate the truth, you disguise it until it is no longer recognized”

Then, the sibylline censorship, even more repugnant. Allow the image, but empty it of meaning.

An old trick of authoritarian power: when you can’t eliminate the truth, you disguise it until it is no longer recognizable.

That’s not communication: it’s manipulation. And in the 21st century, manipulating is the most cowardly and modern form of censorship.

It’s not the first time. In 2022, an internal LaLiga document was uncovered that forced journalists and players to submit their interviews to prior control. The so-called “interview protocol” imposed which questions could be asked and which were prohibited. Nothing about arbitrations, institutional criticism or disciplinary issues.

The text, presented as a Good practice guide, In reality, it was a mechanism of prior censorship, contrary to the most basic principles of free journalism..

The CNMC then warned that this control threatened freedom of information and pluralism. It was an early sign of what has come to pass today. A closed communication system, designed not to inform, but to protect the leader.

To protect himself. Javier Tebas Medrano.

Because Tebas is not satisfied with managing football. He also intends to administer the word and the truth, which can only be his own.

Before the stoppages occurred, LaLiga sent “preventive” messages to the captains. He spoke to them about “unintended consequences.” A textbook euphemism for intimidating without leaving a trace. It was not a recommendation: it was a threat.

Tebas was not satisfied with censoring images. He wanted to muzzle consciences. Because the heart of the matter was not Miami, nor the business, nor the broadcasting. It was the right of the players (of any worker) to publicly dissent.

And that, in any rule of law, is called freedom of expression.

The threats have already taken shape. As reported by COPE, LaLiga has sent a letter to the Association of Spanish Footballers (AFE) in which it warns that it will take “legal measures” against the players once a “quantitative assessment of the damages derived” from the protest stoppage is carried out.

Bullying is no longer disguised as a euphemism. It is formalized in writing. The same power that censored the images now seeks to turn dissent into an “economic harm” and freedom of expression into a “civil liability.”

One more step in the authoritarian drift of Javier Tebas, who does not tolerate anyone (not footballers, not unions, not the media) to question his story.

“Today paintings are no longer censored, gestures are censored. Books are no longer burned, cameras and microphones are turned off”

Censorship has always had the same DNA. Fear of free thought. From the canvases covered by the Inquisition to the “degenerate art” of Goebbelspassing through the genitals covered in the Sistine, power has always tried to erase what makes it uncomfortable.

Javier Tebas’ LaLiga has imported that old logic into modern football. That of replacing reality with its disinfected, harmless, domesticated version.

The difference is that today paintings are no longer censored, gestures are censored. Books are no longer burned, cameras and microphones are turned off. Or overhead shots are broadcast with messages that have nothing to do with the protest, with the sole purpose of misinforming.

For the first time, journalists have stood up unanimously against an atrocity that surpasses any red line. The veteran Tomas Roncero He described the maneuver as “shameful and authoritarian.”

Juanma Rodríguez He went further: “Thebes has lost its mind.”

Y Siro Lopezwith the forcefulness that comes from experience, declared: “This is not football, it is pure manipulation. He has lost his mind.”

The stoppage was unanimous. In the Coliseum, in the Tartiere, in the Luis Companys, in the Sánchez-Pizjuán… In all the fields in Spain, the footballers repeated the gesture.

And in all of them, the cries of “Thebes, go now!” They accompanied the protest with a force that no microphone wanted to pick up.

LaLiga not only tried to hide the image, they also wanted to erase the sound. He censored the soundtrack of an entire country fed up with manipulation. Fed up with the censor. Fed up with Javier Tebas.

Still, everyone understood it. Because when a stand shouts and the television is silent, silence no longer belongs to power, but to proof. And that spontaneous unanimity (players and fans in unison) is what terrifies the censor the most. The shared consciousness.

Javier Tebas has confused the business with the appropriation of the message. He believes that because LaLiga produces the signal (illegitimately, according to the CNMC) it can also produce the truth. His truth.

But the truth is not manufactured, it is shown. And if it is not shown, what remains is propaganda.

Football is, by definition, the territory of popular freedom. When the footballers stop, the power trembles. Tebas wanted to erase a gesture of dignity and ended up revealing his true portrait. That of the leader who prefers silence to criticism, the aerial plane to the human face, propaganda to debate.

An old Roman censor said that “The morality of the people is protected by punishing their vices”.

Today the vice is independence, and the one who punishes is Javier Tebas.

But something has changed. For the first time, the people (players, journalists and fans) are not silent. And when censorship causes more noise than protest, the censor has already lost.

UNESCO has been repeating it for decades. Without freedom of expression there is no democracy possible.

Access to truthful information is a matter of civic health, of democratic survival. Censorship and misinformation are two sides of the same poison. One prevents knowing, the other forces one to believe.

Javier Tebas has made both a management method.

Where there should be transparency, it installs fear. Where there should be debate, he imposes dogma. He confuses communicating with controlling, and the truth with its edited version.

And as long as he continues to believe that directing LaLiga gives him the right to decide what can be seen and what should be kept silent, Spanish football will live under an exceptional audiovisual regime.

All this, as long as the clubs consent to it and the fans tolerate it. It is the clubs who elect Javier Tebas and who can dismiss him, if they want. And it is the fans who must demand that their leaders do so.

Because, deep down, every censor survives as long as silence serves as his accomplice. The day football stops being silent, Javier Tebas will stop ruling.

And football, at last, will be free.

*** Miguel García Caba is a professor of Administrative Law and corresponding academic at the Royal Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation.