Six assistants of VAR They denied that they had been dismissed after the Valencia-Real Madrid league game on the 21st, but they denounced that the Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) has not designated them since then “in retaliation” for filing a conciliation ballot against it, claiming determined rights labor.
In a statement signed by David Medié Jiménez, José Luis González González, Ignacio churches villanuevaDavid Pérez Pallas, Daniel Ocón Arraiz and Víctor Areces Franco, sent to EFE this Tuesday, the attendees affirm that no one from the RFEF has informed them of the termination of their employment relationship, nor their termination or dismissal, so their employment contracts continue in force.
The referees acknowledge, however, that after the Valencia-Real Madrid match, no one has been appointed to act as VAR, “in a decision without precedents since “the system was implemented in Spanish football” and they maintain that eliminating them “jointly and unanimously from the designations does not respond to technical errors during the season”, “nor to any type of incident that occurred in the aforementioned match”.
Quite the contrary, said decision is nothing more than a reprehensible and unjustified retaliation against us, for the mere fact of having filed, a few weeks ago, a conciliation ballot prior to judicial proceedings against the RFEF, in claim of certain labor rights that we understand help us as workers,” they denounce.
On May 23 and after the Valencia-Real Madrid game, on matchday 35, the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) replaced Ignacio Iglesias Villanueva as VAR for the Betis-Getafe match and as assistant VAR (AVAR) for Osasuna-Athletic Club of the following day.
The RFEF reported the decision of the CTA Technical Commission to change the designation of the Galician after what happened in Mestalla, when from the VAR only the referee, Ricardo De Burgos Bengoechea, was shown the blow from Vinícius Júnior to Hugo Duro and not the previous grabbing of the Brazilian’s neck, who was sent off for it.
The Competition Committee annulled the expulsion because it understood that the video images distorted the presumption of veracity of the arbitration act.
Competition pointed out that “the action of the VAR referee would not be framed in a” human error “, since the image that he sent to the referee of the match to assess the action produced was totally partial, biased and determining the error of the referee in the assessment of the occurred and, with it, the unjust expulsion of the player, turning the victim into an aggressor”.
