Hey culers, what do you think about the subject of the referees? Apparently the payments were only for analytical references of the matches but it seems that the information, which was known before, was addressed just in these days, when the best atmosphere of the season is lived. In any case, I think that like the entire Bartomeu era, we pay a lot for nothing because referee rulings have hurt us in the League, Champions League and Cup.
Replying to this as a culer, about a bit more than a year later since I feel it is still a relevant thing.
If you ask me if there was any pressure over referees, I will undoubtly say that yeah, there was, but that is way less pressure than what the RM has always had on referees. I will explain myself. Probably, what happened, is that those payments were strictly for the analytical job over referees that every club has, and Negreira actually had that business even before it was positioned as the referee comitee vicepresident. HOWEVER, it would be very naive from anyone to think that from Barcelona directives, they never thought about, at least, exploiting the position of Negreira, at least to not be whistled against, specially when traditionally, in Spain, several referees were biased towards Real Madrid or even Atlético, but many times harmed Barcelona results.
This is a fact, every big team exerts, directly or indirectly, through money or influences, pressure over the referees. This is a fact. The higher team you are, even only because of being the favorite, you already have certain referee bias in your favour, specially because FOOTBALL IS A BUSINESS, and you always want the big horse to win, since it is the only one that can keep the winning strike long enough as to be a sustained and profitable business. It is what happens in capitalism, instead of having a fair competition, the tendence is to have the bigger fish eating the smaller one by any means possible, and not only by the rules. There's no morals in this society we live, and instead of having sports being an example of how we should behave, it is actually the opposite, sportsmanship becomes a reflection of what our society is, specially when there's so much money that rich people can loose. Rich people have no morals, and they will do whatever it is needed to keep their money and priviledges, included, ofc., cheating and buying referees, or exerting pressure over them.
Obviously, there's several grades into this, and it's heavily tied to the morals and culture of each part of the world, but precisely in Spain, that is probably one of the most corrupt countries in terms of politics and economies morals, what Barça did, being such a big club, that needs to keep winning, is the less you can expect from them.Ttrying to exert pressure over the referees colective to assure, at least, neutrality (which is obviously something very subjective) and not having the referee against them, is the bare minimum that a big club is actually expected to do to keep winning, or at least not having a big difficulty against in doing so. However, that's still exerting pressure over the colective, and even if your only intentions was not to being harmed and keep neutrality (that against, this is subjective, and an actual neutral referee could be sometimes perceived as being against the team) it is still exerting pressure and therefore, a delictive behaviour.
Now, a different thing is that the payment were effectively done only for that reason and not actually cause Negreira had an actual business that actually did a service, to Barcelona and possibly and probably, to other clubs (that obviously won't be accused as Barcelona, btw) and how much you can tie payments to the pressure exerted.
IMHO, Barcelona shouldn't be punished, but Negreira should. And not for having the company, since it existed before taking the charge in the referee comitee, but for not being more clear with services, and ties between it's company and the charge.
It is the obscurity and the difficulty to split his charge and his company what it is a problem here. This wouldn't have happened if the situation had been more transparent from the beginning, and in any case, I do think that there's certain intention by Real Madrid for making Barcelona struggle (something unexplainable since they need Barcelona like breathing air, due to the La Liga bipolar nature), but I feel there's a lot of fear from Real Madrid to have, for third time in the story, a Barcelona that is stronger than them, and that manages to win a lot of titles, and even more, I do think that their biggest fear is that Barcelona actually learn from their mistakes and manage to keep a constant flux of new players that take naturally the relevation in future years for those going away, and keep a constant level of play.
