The Spanish Professional Football League (La Liga) is the most popular and profitable sports league in Spain. (In the 2022-2023 season, La Liga had a record-setting revenue of 1.99 billion euros and more than 11 million spectators.) But the league has been beset by a string of corruption allegations. In an especially prominent recent case, one of La Liga’s most well-known teams, FC Barcelona, confirmed that between 2001 and 2018, the club had paid a total of 7.3 million euros to a consulting company owned by Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira, who during that time was the vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), the national governing body of all football-related activities, including La Liga. Though FC Barcelona acknowledged the payments, the club insisted that the payments were solely for lawful consulting services unrelated to refereeing decisions. FC Barcelona further noted that such consulting arrangements are standard practice among La Liga clubs. (Indeed, a former police commissioner accused Real Madrid CF of paying Negreira as well.)

While the allegations against FC Barcelona are still under investigation, many outside observers would likely conclude that, even if there was no direct quid pro quo, this is a textbook case of a serious conflict of interest. The problem, though, is that it does not appear that there are any rules—under Spanish law, the RFEF Disciplinary Code, or the league’s own regulations—against such conflicts:

• The Spanish Criminal Code (SCC) does prohibit corruption in sports, but the SCC’s definition of the offense of sports corruption is limited to match-fixing. Therefore, it would not be possible to prosecute FC Barcelona or Negreira for sports corruption unless it could be proven that FC Barcelona received favorable treatment from referees in exchange for the payments to Negreira’s company. The SCC has no clause proscribing conflicts of interest in sports.
• On the national football level, the RFEF enforces sporting sanctions, such as suspensions and fines, for specific infractions under the RFEF Disciplinary Code, which does include a clause addressing one specific type of conflict of interest: Article 86 prohibits clubs from providing extra-sporting incentives to further motivate other clubs to win games. But that clause would not seem to apply when a referee receives money from a team.
• And although La Liga is governed by a wide range of private and public regulations (including its general regulations and organizational bylaws), none of these regulations proscribe corruption or conflicts of interest. The most recent La Liga publication on sports corruption, a 2023 document entitled ”Good Practices – Rules and Principles for Spanish Federations, Leagues, and Sportspeople”, focuses on corruption related to gambling, direct match-fixing (prohibited, as noted above, by the SCC’s sports corruption clause), and extra-sporting incentives (as delineated by the RFEF Disciplinary Code). Essentially, these Good Practices are only reiterations of other regulations and do not impose any league-specific obligations. Additionally, although La Liga’s Department of Integrity and Security has its own Sports Corruption Program, this program does not create or enforce any additional anticorruption requirements; instead, the program adopts a corruption prevention strategy that emphasizes integrity workshops for players and the use of data analytics software to monitor suspicious betting activities (information which can be shared with the Spanish national police). In short, La Liga’s anticorruption program focuses on direct match-fixing, especially in the context of sports betting, and does not regulate other serious conflicts of interest.

The fact that none of the aforementioned regulatory frameworks restricts financial relationships between clubs and match officials invites, indeed encourages, clubs to pay for consulting services from those on the administrative and officiating sides of the competition. This is a slippery slope that can lead, as in FC Barcelona’s case, toward what certainly looks like “paying the ref.” Though a direct quid pro quo payment would indeed violate the SCC, such an agreement would be extremely difficult to prove, especially if it were tacit—and an explicit agreement might not even be necessary for a club to gain an unfair advantage.

The kinds of practices that FC Barcelona and other clubs have engaged in erode public trust in football’s governing institutions, and threaten the fundamental principle of fair competition. Many referees from the Negreira era are still active today, and their integrity has been (fairly or unfairly) called into question. (During a game between Granada CF and FC Barcelona this September, Granada fans were heard chanting “Negreira Negreira” whenever they disagreed with a refereeing decision.) This mistrust and antagonism are detrimental to the sport as a whole. To restore integrity to Spanish football, not only must the Negreira case be dealt with fairly, but preventive measures against conflict of interests need to be integrated at various regulatory levels.

One possibility would be to amend the SCC to criminally prohibit financial relationships in the sporting world that present an unreasonable risk of conflict of interest. But the criminal law may be too blunt an instrument to regulate these matters, since the various organizational formats of different sports may present a challenge in identifying such financial relationships. But addressing the problem only through La Liga’s league-specific regulations would be too narrow, as the same type of conflict of interest may also exist in lower-tier professional football. Thus, the best approach would be for the RFEF, the governing body for all Spanish football, to strengthen its Disciplinary Code to address conflicts of interest between clubs and match officials (or those overseeing match officials). Such conflicts of interest should be defined as a serious sanctionable violation of RFEF rules, even without the sort of direct quid pro quo or other conduct that would establish a violation of the SCC. Taking this step would help deter the sort of questionable relationships at issue in the Negreira case, and preserve the integrity of Spanish football.