Should Spain's "La Liga" be looking to the English Premier League as a blueprint? The debate keeps coming back, with many convinced the British competition offers greater competitiveness and parity than the Spanish league, where the title race so often boils down to a fight between football's two giants, Real Madrid and Barcelona.
Javier Tebas has weighed in again. The "La Liga" president used the ceremony in Madrid welcoming the clubs newly promoted to the professional tiers for the (2026-2027) season to praise the way his competition is run, while aiming implicit criticism at Real Madrid president Florentino Perez.
Tebas pointed to the repeated attacks on the competition's regulations. According to the Spanish newspaper "Mundo Deportivo", he said: "There are clubs that always question all our systems and financial rules, and the Real Madrid representative has frequently come out to question them, but this questioning often appears because of the sporting circumstances the club is going through." His point was pointed: the Royal club has been absent from the winners' podium and has gone two years without a trophy.
He then turned his defence of the Spanish model into an attack on the finances of the English league, running through the numbers as he went: "Last year the English league's losses reached one billion pounds sterling, and the year before it recorded similar losses, until the losses reached 10 billion sterling in recent years. If this is the football model we are looking for... then the sustainability of institutions and securing their future comes above everything, for no one now mentions where Leicester City, who were league champions, ended up, and how they are now in the third division."
Tebas saved his sharpest line for the English government's intervention to reform the financial picture: "They do not take the sustainability of clubs into account, and this is why the British government intervened to run the English league through an independent regulatory body, while we in Spain regulate our financial affairs ourselves through the clubs themselves. They certainly would not have taken this step unless there was a clear flaw."
