MADRID, 22 Jul. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The president of League F, Beatriz Álvarez, is very critical of the latest resolution on the Coordination Agreement of the Superior Sports Council (CSD) and warns the Government that “it can blow up a country project” for which it opted to professionalize women’s football, while, although the current situation does not make it pay more attention to this Sunday’s elections, it does want whoever is in charge to “recover a little bit of the sense of what this support for women’s football should be.”
“Like all Spaniards we are awaiting the elections, but Liga F and, as its president, what we are awaiting above all is to move this forward. We are in a very serious situation right now, we are in great danger, because there will come a time when those who bet on a country project can make this explode and make it unsustainable, and that does worry us,” Álvarez confessed in an interview with Europa Press.
The leader does not doubt that the current Government “has bet on this project. “But we claim that the bet can not only be based on money, that it helps, but it is not everything”, she pointed out, highlighting a certain contradiction in “the Government or the CSD”. “If you are injecting a public subsidy for a project in which you believe and that you want it to be the locomotive of the rest of women’s sport, you have to bet with facts and truths”, she asserted.
And it is that it is “upset” by the latest resolution of the Council as there was no agreement with the RFEF on the Coordination Agreement, but also “surprised by the legal part”. “In the absence of an agreement, the law obliges you to coordinate seven fundamental and strictly necessary points to organize a competition and in the resolution there are 17, many of them issues that have nothing to do with the strict necessity to organize a competition but have to do with concessions to one party or requests to a party that has nothing to do with it,” he remarked.
Last season went “for a year without all those issues.” “They have been an action and a political will, nothing to do with a legal question. The political will in that resolution contradicts in any case his commitment to football and the professional league. You cannot bet on a professional league and then the facts, the different resolutions, are to drown the clubs even more, “he criticized.
One of the conflicting points is the 20 percent that he must give to the RFEF of his commercial income “for a conceptual matter.” “La Liga, because it bears the surname of a professional, must support grassroots football. All this makes sense if we think of LaLiga, which has tremendous potential and is generating a lot of money, so it is normal for resources to be distributed from the rich to the poor. Another thing is that this concept wants to be analogous to women’s football in a project that is still subsidized and starting, which generates 6 million euros in audiovisual rights this year, not 2,000,” Álvarez pointed out.
ASKS FOR MORE RIGOR WHEN TALKING ABOUT THE MONEY THEY RECEIVE FROM THE CSD
This points out that the clubs and the Government are “putting money” and that for this reason “perhaps the concept of solidarity” should “in these early years the RFEF also put”, without forgetting that the federative entity not only takes that 20 percent but that “it has increased all the federative expenses in an excessive way, trying to stifle the clubs and the project”.
In addition, Álvarez demands “to be a little scrupulous” about the figures that League F receives from the CSD. “Actually, the subsidy that he gives us is not 35 million, there are 15 for the structure of the F League, 5 that go directly to the RFEF when the arbitration situation is unblocked and then there is the part that is given directly to the clubs to improve their facilities. Directly, we receive 15 million in the next three seasons, so we would not have to qualify or make demagogy either,” he said.
In this sense, he highlights that the RFEF “has called itself the second richest in Europe” and that it has “a surplus of more than 28 million” to defend that another concept of solidarity “really promotes”. “They do it in other countries and in other Spanish leagues this offense is not occurring. It is evident that this not only damages the F League but also the rest of the leagues that are also very upset with this resolution,” he added.
For this reason, the employers filed an appeal for replacement of this CSD resolution due to some conflicting points that they see as “inadmissible” and that they hope the current government can resolve. “We don’t know if they are going to resolve it, if they are going to let it go or if it will be up to another government. Let’s hope that whatever comes (in the elections), the sense of what this support for women’s football had to be or should be is recovered a bit,” he said.
“I WANTED TO BE OPTIMISTIC THIS YEAR AND THEN I HIT IT”
In addition, he no longer knows whether to be optimistic. “I wanted to be one throughout this year many times and I hit it and they tripped me again, with which I prefer to be realistic and have my feet on the ground. Pedro Sánchez himself said the other day that if the president of the F League complained that something was not being done well, I take that message. If he says that it is because they have done some self-criticism, but indeed there are things that are not being done well,” said the Asturian leader.
Beatriz Álvarez has not spoken personally with Sánchez, but rather with Miquel Iceta, Minister of Culture and Sports, who seemed to agree that “analogy regarding the masculine and proportionality” had to be applied, but that later came “this resolution that the CSD invented that same afternoon and where there was neither proportionality nor analogy”. “It is what we have told him again so that he knows that we fully agreed with those conclusions, but that they do not correspond to what was later carried out,” she declared.
On the other hand, the president of the F League praised Irene Lozano, the president of the CSD who “was the true promoter of this project” and who “despite the difficulties she went through, especially at the beginning, she believed with conviction and promoted it”. However, she returned to the world of politics and from there she believes that there has been “much instability in the CSD, many changes, also with general directors”, something that has projected “instability also in the rest of Spanish sport”.
Finally, regarding the fact that the last two presidents of the CSD, José Manuel Franco and Víctor Francos, may have a more political than sporting profile, he did not want to give too much importance because “above all they must try to be fair and have common sense”. “It’s a bit what we believe has been lacking in the CSD, promoting a professional league and then trying to drown it out perhaps because it doesn’t make much sense,” he concluded.