By Andrew Warshaw
February 20 – Efforts to play a Spanish league game overseas to promote the brand may have failed but the Spanish Super Cup, a different competition, looks set to do exactly that under a new revamped format of four teams, with semi-finals and final.
The ground-breaking idea has been proposed by Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) President Luis Rubiales (pictured) and is set to take place in August of this year, with both the winners and runners up of both La Liga and the Copa del Rey qualifying.
In the event that a team qualifies through both competitions, the vacant place would be taken by the team with the best historical record in the Copa del Rey that had not already qualified for the Super Cup.
“We see an opportunity to promote the brand of Spain without attacking sporting principles,” Rubiales told a news conference, without giving details of exactly where the games would take place. They must first be approved by the federation’s assembly in April.
Rubiales has already broken with tradition by turning the traditional season-opening clash between the La Liga champions and the Copa del Rey winners from a two-legged tie into a single game last year, played in Tangier, Morocco, where Barcelona beat Sevilla 2-1.
But he vehemently opposed La Liga’s plans to play Spanish top flight games abroad causing Barcelona to withdraw from a proposed high-profile fixture against Girona in Miami citing a lack of consensus even though their president Josep Maria Bartomeu says he would ideally like to see as many as three La Liga games a season abroad.
Rubiales insists there is no contradiction between moving the Super Cup abroad and “the basic principle that a home team should always play at their ground”.
But understandably the outspoken president of LaLiga, Javier Tebas, who spearheaded the concept of playing one league game a season overseas, is opposing the replacement changes arguing that that Rubiales should have been focusing on more needy areas of Spanish football rather than simply dealing with clubs at the top.
“Rubiales has clearly abandoned non-professional football, which is the area that he really deals with,” charged Tebas.
“I was expecting him to announce a plan of action for professional football: how to reduce the debt … in the [lower footballing] categories, [as well as] protecting youth academies and (dealing with) physical violence.”
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