Tomás Guasch's Critique of La Liga Refereeing
Tomás Guasch has launched a blistering attack on La Liga refereeing, accusing VAR officials of treating Real Madrid goals as a problem to be solved rather than part of the game.
The veteran Spanish journalist, speaking with content creator Ricardo Ramos Nera on YouTube and quoted by Defensa Central, claimed that every Madrid goal is subjected to forensic, almost obsessive scrutiny.
“With every Real goal that doesn't come from a shot from 40 metres, they replay the footage on VAR and look for an excuse to disallow it. There must be someone whose only job is to follow the Madrid goals,” he said.
According to Guasch, the pattern is always the same.
“They replay the footage. They rewind two or three times until they find that the player was in an offside position,” he continued. “I'm telling you they wouldn't disallow this goal if it were for another team. It goes on like that, replay after replay, until they finally find a pass in which the player was ahead.”
Fury over Espí’s disallowed header
His anger boiled over after Real Madrid’s 1-0 defeat to Real Betis, specifically the offside call that wiped out Carlos Espí’s late equaliser.
In the 87th minute, Espí powered in a superb header after a cross from Vinícius on the right. On the pitch, referee Hernández Hernández gave the goal. Up in the booth, Iglesias Villanueva, in charge of VAR, did not.
Minutes later, the goal was gone.
For Guasch, that sequence summed up everything that is wrong with the current system.
“Now you have someone up there, and I don't know how many assistants are alongside him, and three or four screens in front of him. There can be no mistake. No, they say ‘he interpreted it’... Stop interpreting, and stop twisting the language in this way, and talking about grey areas, the intensity of the challenge, and excessive force... all of this is a distortion of reality,” he argued.
Guasch, who works with Cadena COPE and writes for El Debate, did not hold back on what he believes lies behind these decisions.
“They act in bad faith, and I am absolutely certain of that.”
He went even further, describing referees and especially VAR officials as the true adversaries teams face.
“In front of you, you have your sporting opponent, then you have the biggest enemies, and those are these people, especially the VAR men, isn't that right?” he said. “When I say VAR commandos, that's the truth.”
Mbappé penalty sparks fresh outrage
The disallowed goal was not his only grievance from the match. Guasch also pointed to the penalty missed by Kylian Mbappé, and what he saw as a clear failure to apply the laws consistently.
Marc Bartra encroached into the area before Mbappé struck his penalty, yet the spot-kick was not ordered to be retaken. For Guasch, that was no oversight.
“They don't retake the penalty because they don't want to,” he said, dismissing any notion of a simple refereeing error. “The person up there already knows what he has to do, and they have invented a rule... They have violated the international rule, and on top of that it goes against common sense.”
He then broke down the incident in detail, insisting Bartra’s encroachment had a direct impact.
“Bartra... does he affect the play? Yes, because he's the player who arrives to prevent or obstruct Mbappé's shot, and therefore... listen to me carefully... you said a month ago that this is a penalty and it must be retaken, so why do you interfere in this case?”
For Guasch, the answer is simple: the real power no longer sits with the referee on the grass.
“So who holds the decision in refereeing? The person on the video technology, and that's it. Nothing more than that.”
A former deputy editor-in-chief at AS and ex-columnist at Marca, Guasch has long been one of the few voices in the Spanish media still openly criticising the Negreira case. Now he has turned his fire on what he sees as a new problem: a league where, in his view, matches are decided less by players and more by the men in the VAR room.
