• Javier Tebas hits out at Club
World Cup expansion• ‘One of the major issues is financial doping’
The president of La Liga, Javier Tebas, was in
London last week. Recently re-elected for a further four-year term, the controversial 57-year-old was in the capital for the launch of his TV channel, La Liga TV; but he had other things to say too, lots of them.
La Liga, like the
Premier League, is in competition for global eyeballs. It wants to grow its audience around the globe and get them to spend more time watching Spanish football year on year. Hence the new TV station launching in the
UK one year after the collapse of Eleven Sports. As an administrator, however, Tebas has other concerns; the one that plagues him most being the proliferation of football competitions, the most problematic of those being Fifa’s expanded Club World Cup, a 24-team competition set to be held in
China in the summer of 2021.