Real Madrid start their LaLiga season on Saturday night in Barcelona, in José Mourinho's first competitive league match of his second spell at the club. And on the eve of it, Javier Tebas chose to talk about Real Madrid's complaints rather than Real Madrid's football.
The LaLiga president has put Los Blancos back in his sights, drawing a direct comparison between the way Madrid and Barcelona deal with the league's governing bodies — and leaving little doubt about which of the two he thinks made more noise. The remarks, reported on Friday evening by Bernabéu Digital, revive a feud that has run for the best part of a decade, and they land less than 24 hours before a new campaign begins.
What Tebas said about Real Madrid
The LaLiga president's central claim was a straight contrast in frequency. Barcelona, he argued, raise formal objections a couple of times a year. Madrid, in his telling, did it constantly.
Barcelona complain twice a season, and Real Madrid used to complain before every single matchday, before the games were played.
Javier Tebas, via Bernabéu Digital (translated from Spanish)
Note the tense. Tebas is describing something he says used to happen — specifically, he ties it to the seasons in which Real Madrid were fighting for the title. He then made that link explicit.
It's curious that from the moment Real Madrid could no longer be league champions, there were no more videos.
Javier Tebas, via Bernabéu Digital (translated from Spanish)
Bernabéu Digital read that second line as a pointed reference to the pre-match refereeing videos that became a fixture of the club's media output. Tebas himself did not spell out what he meant, and it is worth being precise about that: the inference is the reporting outlet's, not a quote.
Why Tebas versus Real Madrid keeps coming back
None of this is new territory. The relationship between the LaLiga president and the Santiago Bernabéu has been adversarial for years, across the Super League, the CVC investment deal, television rights and refereeing. Real Madrid have been consistently among the most critical voices about how Spanish football is governed, and Tebas has rarely declined the invitation to answer back.
What gives the timing a little extra edge is the state of the argument about officiating right now. Madrid begin this season as the one club whose home ground sits outside the league's new arrangements for referees — the Bernabéu is the only LaLiga stadium left out of the new protocol. In that context, a comment about Madrid complaining too often is not a neutral observation. It is a position.
There is also the small matter of the sporting backdrop Tebas is leaning on. Real Madrid finished 2025-26 without a trophy for the first time since 2020-21, with Barcelona winning LaLiga. His framing — complaints stopped when the title race did — only works if you accept that reading of a difficult year, and Madridistas are unlikely to.
A new season, an old argument
The club has not responded publicly, and nothing in the reporting suggests it intends to. Mourinho, for his part, spent his own pre-match press conference on rather different ground, setting the bar at trophies and talking about the physical state of his squad rather than the institutions around it.
That may be the most useful way to read Friday. One side of Spanish football spent the eve of matchday one relitigating last season; the other went to Barcelona to play. Espanyol against Real Madrid kicks off at 21:30 Spanish time on Saturday, and the quickest way to make the noise irrelevant is to be top of the table when it starts again.
Tebas will keep talking; he always does. Whether Madrid give him a title race to talk about is the only part of this any Madridista actually controls.
