La Liga’s President Javier Tebas has taken a fresh dig at the English Premier League accusing the association of “financial doping”.
His comments come on the back of the winter transfer window where English teams spent a record $1 billion in the January transfer window and outspent the rest of Europe’s big five leagues by almost four to one.
“We read, the “strength” of the Premier League, but it is a competition based on millionaire losses of the clubs, (their ordinary income is not enough for them) most of the clubs are ‘financially doped’,” Tebas wrote on Twitter as he shared a video of La Liga’s Corporate Director Javier Gomez discussing the issue.
“They are doping the clubs, they are injecting money that is not generated by the clubs. This puts the viability of a club at risk when this shareholder leaves. In our opinion, this is cheating because it drags down the rest of the leagues.”
The 60-year-old then implored UEFA to step in and curb this inequity in his eyes.
The Premier League has rubbished his claims in response, claiming that figures provided by Javier Tebas are not accurate.
A spokesperson for the league said that in the period in question, the losses were around 1 billion pounds mainly caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic with equity injected accounting for 1.6 billion pounds.
The irony in Tebas’ claims is that Real Madrid, ostensibly, started the practice of paying huge transfer sums for players in the first place. Beginning with Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale followed suit for a world record fee before Barcelona signed Ousmane Dembele, Antoine Griezmann and Phillipe Coutinho in three of the most expensive transfers.
Atletico Madrid soon joined the party by signing Joao Felix for 127 million Euros.
