Real Madrid's board and La Liga president Javier Tebas took their feud to a new level on Friday, with the Spanish club demanding Tebas's "immediate" resignation from the presidency of the league and from his post as vice-president of the Spanish Football Federation.
Tebas had compared Real Madrid's management methods to those of Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister in Nazi Germany. It was the latest chapter in a dispute that has stretched between the two sides for years.
Irony runs right through it, because Tebas always insists he supports Real Madrid. In November 2025, a member of the club's general assembly called for him to be declared a "persona non grata". Tebas responded that he had been "a Madridista since the age of six", adding: "I chose to be a Madridista... and I am still a Madridista like anyone else."
Those running Real Madrid today are "neither the club nor its history", Tebas said, and are pushing projects that "weaken the league that helped them become great".
Read also
Yamal tops the chance creators in the Champions League: and a prestigious position for Diaz
Champions League statistics: Real Madrid the historic kings of the comeback, with Barcelona runners-up
Back in May 2023 he called himself "a Madridista, but not a Florentinista", a dig at club president Florentino Perez.
The roots of the conflict
The public dispute dates back to August 2021, when the league announced an agreement with the investment fund CVC to inject 2.7 billion euros into the competition. Real Madrid rejected the deal. They saw it as taking 10.95% of the clubs' television broadcasting rights for 50 years "using a misleading structure and in breach of the law", as the club described it.
Madrid also objected to the agreement being concluded without their involvement or knowledge, and without competition between different offers. The La Liga president hit back that "the threatening style Perez has used in private for years has now moved into the open", before signing off: "Real Madrid deserves more."
The Super League and refereeing
The Super League project, launched by 12 clubs in April 2021 under Perez's leadership, became another flashpoint. After the European Court of Justice ruled in December 2023 that the rules of FIFA and UEFA on approving new competitions breached competition law, Tebas played down the ruling and mocked Perez, saying that he "never loses".
February 2025 brought the refereeing row to the boil. After Real Madrid's defeat to Espanyol, the club sent a letter to the Spanish Football Federation demanding "a complete overhaul of the refereeing system". Tebas responded that the club's board "had lost its mind", accusing its channel of inflaming matches and describing the referees as corrupt. The league then filed a complaint against Real Madrid with the disciplinary committee.
Then came October 2025, when Real Madrid opposed the league's project to stage the Villarreal v Barcelona match in Miami, considering that it undermined the integrity of the competition. After the project was cancelled, Tebas wrote, without naming Real Madrid, that "the integrity of the competition" is invoked by those who have been casting doubt on it for years and putting pressure on referees.
The latest crisis
This one erupted when Tebas wrote on the platform X that Real Madrid's board was conducting an "orchestra", fronted by the club's television channel, relying on "selecting the clips that suit it, repeating the sense of victimhood, feeding suspicion and identifying enemies".
He added that this style "recalls the propaganda mechanisms exploited by Goebbels", stressing that the comparison was with those techniques, "not with an ideology, and certainly not with Real Madrid's fans". He was responding to Real Madrid's recent criticism of refereeing.
Madrid fired back with an official statement calling the comparison "absolutely unacceptable and extremely serious". The club considered Tebas's remarks "a new episode in a series of repeated attacks", and accused him of using them to cast doubt on its moves regarding the Negreira case.
His attacks amount to "a real plague on Spanish football", the club added, before demanding his resignation. The hostility between the two sides has never run this deep.