Body cam footage exposes non-called penalty on Pubill in Madrid derby

The Madrid derby keeps giving people something to talk about, and this time the main character wasn't a player, but the referee. LaLiga decided to release the body camera footage from Ortiz Arias, and the image is pretty telling: the Marc Pubill play, in which a possible handball inside the area was flagged, was right in front of him. No obstruction, no "didn't get a good look." The camera doesn't lie.

In the audio that was released, the referee himself can be heard saying the play "hit his chest, they're looking at it." That's as far as it goes. He doesn't call a penalty, and to the surprise of many, VAR doesn't step in to correct him either, even though the footage makes clear he had a prime view of the action. So how do you explain a play ending in something as anticlimactic as a simple throw-in?

Because that's exactly what happened in the end: after telling Vinícius the play was under review, and getting no correction from the VAR booth, Ortiz Arias settled it with a throw-in. Case closed on a play that, viewed through the body camera, raised a lot more questions than the officiating crew's final call suggested in the moment.

The CTA acknowledges two more errors

The release of this footage came just a day after the Referees' Technical Committee did its weekly review of controversial calls, an exercise in which the Madrid derby was once again front and center. The CTA, through its Tiempo de Revisión program, ended up admitting two errors in the match.

The first one has a name attached to it: Kang-In Lee. According to the committee's review, the Atletico Madrid forward's challenge on Federico Valverde should have resulted in a red card. That wasn't the only play put under the microscope: the clash between Cuti Romero and Jude Bellingham also went through the CTA's filter, though in that case it was classified as a play with "a high degree of interpretation," a polite way of saying there's no single, clear reading of it.

Where the committee was unequivocal was on the penalty involving Giuliano Simeone. There, according to the CTA, Ortiz Arias got it wrong by showing a yellow card to Dean Huijsen, though on that occasion VAR did step in and corrected the call on the spot. The committee itself went into detail explaining why:

Giuliano Simeone drives into the box. Position won, heading toward goal, ball under control. Huijsen grabs his arm with no chance to play the ball. Clear cause and effect. A clear and obvious error by the referee, VAR was right to intervene.Referees' Technical Committee

Between the Pubill play now exposed thanks to the body camera and the two officially acknowledged errors, the officiating in the derby is once again at the center of the conversation. And not exactly for the reasons a referee would want.