Football Daily | Madrid, Mourinho and the fight for neutrality in row with Javier Tebas

A LIGA OF ITS OWN While football managers moaning about referees to deflect from their own teams’ shortcomings is nothing new, few do performative, wounded, righteous indignation with quite the same brooding intensity and petulance as José Mourinho. It’s been more than two decades since his moaning preceded a pile-on from angry fans whose threats forced the Swedish referee Anders Frisk into early retirement and in the interim, a steady stream of red cards, touchline bans and mournful post-match monologues have rendered his rap-sheet for badgering officialdom longer than a roll of Andrex toilet paper. On Sunday, Mourinho was at it again, following his 10-man Real Madrid side’s 2-1 defeat at the hands of their bitter city rivals Atlético. He arrived at his post-match presser armed with a sheet of A4 featuring screen-grabs of two tackles made by Atlético players that he felt should have resulted in red cards. “We can save ourselves the bother of the press conference because the story is right here,” he harrumphed, waving his piece of paper in front of assembled hacks before embarking on a paranoid tirade about Spanish match officials continuing to have it in for the put-upon, plucky underdogs of Real Madrid.

Luckily for daily football emails tasked with providing mildly amusing #content in the bleak and desolate early days of international breaks when nothing much is happening, the story didn’t end there. On Tuesday, the serially outspoken La Liga president Javier Tebas weighed in on Social Media Disgraces in response to an article in a Spanish publication called El Debate. In it, Tomás González-Martín suggested that, by failing to pander to the likes of Madrid, referees were damaging the league on whom they rely for a living, a league González-Martin claims has no value without Madrid. “Here they go again, the mouthpieces and the regime’s television, building the same old narrative: the permanent conspiracy,” thundered Tebas. “But this article goes further: it claims that referees harm ‘the business that feeds them’. What exactly is it asking for? Refereeing based on revenue, viewership or the badge? What a way to understand equality in the competition.”

While Tebas was right to defend his officials against accusations of institutional bias when it comes to Real Madrid and to angrily rail against the notion that commercial considerations should be factored into their decision-making process, he almost certainly aimed his guns at the wrong target. By targeting an opinion piece written by a random hack rather than the comments made by Mourinho, he left himself open to accusations of partiality towards Madrid. Not that the club see it that way. “Our club considers it intolerable that the president of La Liga uses his institutional position to continue discrediting and attacking Real Madrid,” they moaned in an official statement. “Given this inappropriate and persistent behaviour, we believe that the professional football competition in Spain urgently needs a leader capable of managing it and realising its full potential with the fundamental duty of neutrality.” More specifically, a leader whose fundamental duty of neutrality is tilted in favour of Mourinho’s Madrid.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY “You can always play the ​moralist, but I think everyone would say yes to that. I ​don’t want to ‌have to work ​any more after my ​career. I didn’t need to after City either, but now I can also set up future generations of my family well. If this choice means my grandchildren can also live comfortably, why wouldn’t I do it?” – Tijjani Reijnders makes the rare admission that he’s a footballer moving somewhere for the money, having joined Al Qadisah in Saudi Arabia from Manchester City on a deal worth a reported €100m over four years.

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FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS OK, I’m putting my head above the parapet here, but I disagree with the prevailing view that Thomas Tuchel’s tactics and substitutions led to England’s defeat to Argentina in the Geopolitics World Cup (yesterday’s Football Daily). I believe it was individual errors and an obsession with Lionel Messi that caused the two goals conceded. Goal one: Djed Spence and Harry Kane were doubling up on Messi but Elliot Anderson was unnecessarily drawn over to Messi, which made space for Enzo Fernández to score. Poor defending. Goal two: when marking Messi, Spence and Nico O’Reilly were in parallel with each other rather than being diagonal. This was also poor defending and enabled Messi to cross” – Mike Harrison.

Of course, like all right-minded people, I only get my football news from Big Website, but I did chance upon this piece from the wonderfully named Argentinian outlet, Diario Olé. Apparently, the Argentinian FA (which once held an election between two candidates with its 75 members that ended in a 38-38 tie) has announced yet another new trophy, the Recopa de Campeones, a round-robin competition between the winner of the Copa Argentina, SuperCopa Argentina and SuperCopa Internacional, which means Argentinian football looks like this. The late, great Maurits Cornelis Escher would be proud” – Noble Francis.

If you have any, please send letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. Today’s letter o’ the day prize goes to … Noble Francis, who wins a copy of Behind the Curtain by Big Website’s Jonathan Wilson. It’s out now and available in The Guardian Bookshop alongside loads of other great football titles. Terms and conditions for our competitions, when we run them, are here.

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