“Robin Hood” Javier Tebas doubles down on PSG criticism

There’s been plenty of mockery of La Liga president Javier Tebas around Europe since he unleashed a stinging criticism of PSG, and it’s easy to understand why.

Of course, the trigger is sour grapes over Kylian Mbappe accepting insane money from the Parisians, but that doesn’t make his whole point baseless – and in fact there’s unquestionably plenty of merit to it.

He’s campaigned over unbalanced and unfair spending throughout his presidency, and he’s certainly not giving up now that it’s making itself so obvious, at his league’s expense.

His latest comments on the subject elucidate his point even more clearly:

“We are not going to allow a European team to destroy the ecosystem of European football. It’s not a problem of French football but of European football. We want the Ligue 1 to be a sustainable competition. It’s not good for the industry,” he explained in quotes picked up by ESPN.

“A team that was losing €300 to €400 million in the past three seasons will be spending this year over €600m in wages… We seem like the European Robin Hoods. I have spoken with other leagues, and some could join us [in the claim]. We are going to do it no matter what the president of the French league says. They already know me in Europe.”

Tebas is a controversial figure to say the least, and La Liga’s complaints are by no means hypocrisy-free, given how Barcelona and Real Madrid themselves treat the teams in their league.

But despite all that, the sheer madness of the distortion of the game by PSG means that even Tebas is coming out of this affair with a sheen of heroism – a sort of Robin Hood, as he puts it.