UEFA confirms it has received Real Madrid's Negreira case file

The Negreira case is no longer confined to the offices at Ciudad Deportiva or the Spanish courts. It has crossed borders and is now under the scrutiny of UEFA, which has confirmed receiving "a substantial amount of documents" sent by Real Madrid regarding Barcelona's payments to José María Enríquez Negreira, the former vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees at Spain's soccer federation.

The European body was clear in its statement: its ethics and disciplinary inspectors "will take into account" the material "as part of their ongoing investigation." This is no small procedural step. Real Madrid has spent months insisting this file deserves a response, and now it remains to be seen what UEFA does with all that paperwork.

And there is a lot of paperwork. Florentino Pérez himself had already signaled in May, during the press conference in which he called presidential elections at the club, that something major was in the works:

We are putting together a 500 page file that we are going to submit to UEFA. How could we forget it? The biggest corruption case in the history of soccer.Florentino Pérez

The Real Madrid president didn't stop there. He went further, pointing out that the damage isn't limited to his own club:

Madrid's members are with me against Negreira's referees. Barça always comes out ahead, but there are other clubs that have also been hurt by this, and they tell me so. Let's see if we're serious about this and UEFA steps in, because it cannot allow the most important soccer in the world to be in the hands of corruption paid for over 20 years.Florentino Pérez

Those words did not sit well with Barcelona, which responded by filing a preliminary legal action against Florentino Pérez for alleged defamation, a required step before a formal criminal complaint. The Catalan club warned back in June that if the complaint wasn't "duly addressed," it would proceed with the criminal case. A conciliation hearing between the two parties is scheduled for November 25 in Madrid, a mandatory step before the matter can be formalized in court.

A file UEFA is keeping on hold

Meanwhile, UEFA is sitting on its own proceeding against Barcelona, opened months earlier and suspended since July 2023, though it has left the door open to reactivating it on its own initiative if its Ethics and Disciplinary inspectors deem it necessary. At the time, the Catalan club submitted a written report, and the Appeals Committee decided to provisionally allow its participation in European competitions, while reserving "a future decision on admission or exclusion" for later.

Behind all this is the investigation by Spain's Attorney General's Office, which suspects that Barcelona's payments to Negreira, totaling more than seven million euros between 2001 and 2018, may have been intended to influence referees. Barcelona, for its part, has always maintained that those payments were for reports and technical advice on referees, nothing more.

In its statement, Real Madrid asked that "the investigation move forward with the utmost speed until its full conclusion" and stressed that the documentation it submitted "includes extensive documentation and evidence regarding matters of extraordinary gravity." The club insists it will continue cooperating with UEFA "to help clarify facts it considers incompatible with the principles of integrity, transparency and fair play" in European soccer. It remains to be seen whether the European body picks up the pace or whether this file continues to move slowly, as is so often the case.