Spanish referee Javier Turienzo Alvarez has an interesting angle on sublety. Alvarez has received death threats and hostile phonecalls following his remarkable quarter of an hour at the weekend when he managed to send off two Real Madrid players (Ivan Helguera and Alvaro Mejia) and, for good measure, provided Racing de Santander with two penalties to boot. The 2-1 defeat may well decide the La Liga against the Castillians and Alvarez claims that his six year old daughter has been targeted because her father has "ruined things for Real". Well, he certainly achieved that...
Alvarez has always been an entertaining official and La Liga has always been an entertaining league.
The control of officials by clubs is not only a major influence on match outcomes in Spain but is also a generally accepted manipulation culturally. Sports newspapers like Marca and El Mundo Deportivo frequently address the choice of officials for future matches and the presidents of the clubs equally frequently act up when it is felt that a fair deal is not in the air. Control of officials is the single most dominant corruption in La Liga although the use of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) comes a close second. Gambling money plays it's part but the majority of the manipulation relates to political and regional power politics. In our estimation, the absolute degree of corruption is of similar magnitude in both Spain and Italy as is the usage of PESs and, indeed, the unpleasant degree of racism.
Regarding the specific incident at the weekend. Alvarez, as far as I am aware, has no links to bookmakers. His officiating is biased but that sentence could be applied to virtually any top flight official in Spain. Spanish referees are based in regional colegios or schools and carry their regionalism into their officiating. Alvarez, for example, has a particular grudge against the city of Sevilla. The Big 2 teams, Barcelona and Real Madrid, also exercise a significant degree of control over many officials. It is simply laughable for Real to be hissy fitting over any perceived refereeing injustices as they were consummate rule benders when the Partido (not so) Popular were in power. And not just with respect to refereeing decisions - remember the lucrative deal struck for the sale of the prime real estate that was Real's training ground.
The two real issues about the weekend are as follows.
Barcelona are in control currently - Madrid probably are required to be about six points better than the Catalunyans to achieve parity.
And the referees are vulnerable. We see a future where football referees take on the protected isolationism granted to horseracing jockeys in Britain. Huge profits and losses result from officiating both with regard to the global gambling markets and individual club success within the game. Top jockeys effectively have their entire existences controlled by their operators. They do a job and they are protected with nice big houses in establishment in-breeding territory like Newmarket (if the Stepford Wives or Wicker Man were to be set in England - Newmarket's your place!) The only point to add being that the size of their living abodes bears no relation to their legitimate riding career earnings!
Referees will also need to be esconced in football's equivalent of Baghdad's Green Zone - the experience of Bob Woolmer is prescient of future realities. If corruption must be the future of the game then, at the very least, there must be protection for family members, particularly children, who are innocent bystanders to the criminal infrastructure.
Now, where's that phonebook? Hertfordshire... Tring... Poll... Graham...
