There was a time when Luis Rubiales (1977), the president of the Spanish Football Federation, was regarded as a radical champion of football players in a vulnerable position. In the turn of the century he played as a defender for Lleida, Xerez, Alicante and Levante. Modest clubs, with ambitions that often exceeded available budgets. When the money ran out and salaries were not paid, Rubiales took action for himself and his teammates. At Levante, he, son of a socialist mayor, even got his fellow players to go on strike. Successfully.
The contrast with the position in which Rubiales now finds himself could hardly be greater. Since he kissed the Spanish player Jenni Hermoso on the mouth unsolicited at the award ceremony after the World Cup final, after he had grabbed his crotch in the VIP box as a gesture of victory, he has come to symbolize everything that is wrong with Spanish football: abuse of power, macho culture and nepotism.
This time Rubiales himself is the target of a strike. More than eighty Spanish players, including the entire World Cup selection, will no longer play for the national team as long as Rubiales is in his post. On Monday, the Spanish judiciary announced that it would open a preliminary investigation into sexual assault by the federation president. Earlier he was (temporarily) suspended by world football association FIFA and the Spanish government started a procedure to get him out. If it is up to the Spanish Minister of Sports, this case will be the “MeToo moment of Spanish football.”
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Rubiales refuses to give in for the time being. “I am not resigning!”, he repeated five times on Friday in a speech during an emergency meeting of his football association. According to the chairman, Hermoso agreed to the kiss and he himself is the victim of “false feminists, one of the scourges of this country”. The reaction of those present, loud applause, caused great astonishment at home and abroad. It was perhaps foreseeable that his mother would come to the rescue for him – she announced on Monday that she would go on hunger strike because of the “bloodthirsty witch hunt” against her son. But why does a national football association support a chairman who has misbehaved in front of the world and is now calling for resistance everywhere?
Hacked phone calls
It’s not unique. At the beginning of this year, Rubiales’ French counterpart, 81-year-old Noël Le Graët, was forced to resign after almost 12 years. An investigation commissioned by the French government had revealed that Le Graët had engaged in sexually transgressive behaviour. The French Football Federation called the investigation “less than objective” and refused to convict Le Graët. Remarkable: Le Graët, a confidant of FIFA boss Gianni Infantino, later got a position at a new FIFA office in Paris.
It shows the great status and influence of federation presidents such as Le Graët and Rubiales. Unlike in the Netherlands and other North-Western European countries, the presidency of the football association in France and Spain is a powerful position. Rubiales’ predecessor, Ángel Maria Villar, was in charge of the Spanish Football Federation for three decades before being arrested in 2017 over suspected fraud.
Rubiales has also been controversial from the moment he succeeded Villar. One of his first acts was the dismissal of national coach Julen Lopetegui, two days before the World Cup in Russia (2018). Lopetegui had, without informing Rubiales, signed a contract to start working for Real Madrid after the tournament. I do not accept, was Rubiales’ implacable message.
Rubiales later came under fire for selling the Spanish Super Cup. Those matches (four teams participate) are now played in Saudi Arabia, which the Spanish Football Association pays a lot of money for. Hacked telephone conversations revealed that a company owned by former FC Barcelona star Gerard Piqué has received 24 million euros for mediation between the Spanish federation and the Saudis. Rubiales’ defense? “There is a campaign to discredit me. (…) They might even put a bag of cocaine in the trunk of my car one day.”