When in 2019 everything went wrong, surely few people imagined that the city of Reus would continue to enjoy its football. After years of irresponsible management that caused shameful scenes, La Liga decided to expel Reus Deportiu with the season already started in the Second Division. Joan Oliver, former general director of Barça in Joan Laporta's first tenure, had managed to bring Reus to the Spanish Second Division for the first time, but he did so by playing so hard that he burned his fingers. He fell out with the fans, stopped paying, and couldn't find anyone to sell the entity to. Instead of bringing glory to Reus football, he sank it.

At the start of the season, Barcelonism agreed that winning the League again would be a great achievement, because the team “of all Spaniards” could not repeat the surprising, almost ridiculous, blank year with a squad full of multi-million euro signings who were supposed to usher in some new era of world football under a new coach, Xabi Alonso, presented as a Guardiola for this new hegemony. Eight months and two coaches later, Alonso appears on the long list of victims of president Florentino Pérez; the multi-million euro signings have once again shown that, as Cruyff used to say, you've never seen a bag of money score goals; Madrid is once again left blank; Barça wins the League for the second consecutive year, and, in line with this good governance, Mourinho (!) is rumoured for next year.

The name of Marie-Louise Eta (Dresden, 1991) has already been etched in the world of football. She has become the first woman to manage a men's team within the top five leagues (England, Spain, Italy, Germany, and France). She arrives at the Union Berlin bench with the mission to turn around the difficult situation they are going through. The team is not in the relegation zone, but they have been in a very bad dynamic for a few months. They had a good first half of the season and reached Christmas in eighth place, close to European spots. However, since then, results have worsened: out of the last 16 matches, they have only won two.

Huesca and Real Zaragoza arrived at the 37th matchday of the Second Division with the urgent need to score points in an increasingly suffocating period of the season. The team from the Aragonese capital is in the lower zone, very close to a relegation that would be as historic as it would be dramatic. And Huesca also fails to distance itself from danger. In this context, the Aragonese derby presented itself as an especially delicate fixture, with the feeling that a defeat could have decisive consequences in the fight for permanence.

The Italian Guardia di Finanza has dismantled a network accused of exploiting prostitution and managing nightlife-related events that allegedly provided services to high-level footballers. Among the players mentioned are Real Madrid's Dean Huijsen and Inter's defender, a target for Barça, according to information that has emerged in the Italian press. As confirmed by the EFE agency, the operation, which is being investigated by the Milan Court at the request of the Public Prosecutor's Office, has resulted in four people under house arrest, accused of facilitating prostitution by organizing escort services, as well as money laundering derived from this activity.

Sant Andreu is celebrating. One of the historic Catalan football clubs has been able to celebrate promotion to Primera RFEF, after the triumph of the four-bar team (2-1) against Reus Reddis in a Narcís Sala packed to the rafters. More than a decade later, the club returns to the third tier of state football after a strange week as the team's coach, Natxo González, suffered a heart attack that led to him being hospitalized. Today, logically, he could not be on the bench for the match against the Reus team, a club where he also worked. The Reus fans present at Narcís Sala showed banners of support for González, who could not witness the triumph on the field with goals from Mendes and Señé, from a penalty. Goals that led to a great celebration on the stadium's pitch.

The life of Alberto Edjogo-Owono Montalbán (Sabadell, 1984) has always revolved around a ball. He defended the jersey of clubs such as Sabadell, Sant Andreu, Granollers, or l'Olímpic de Xàtiva, in addition to passing through Espanyol's youth football. He was also an international for Equatorial Guinea, his father's native land. He is now a television commentator for DAZN, where he broadcasts the best matches of the First Division. Edjogo has just published Heridas en la piel (geoPlaneta), a book where he reflects on racism in the world of football.

FC Thun is making history not only in the Swiss Super League, but in European football. The team where the Catalan Genís Montolio plays has been promoted to the First Division this very season and, far from settling in and playing it safe, has wanted to go a little further and establish itself as the undisputed leader of the competition. “It is a situation that nobody expected. Being first or even fighting for European places was almost unthinkable. I am valuing it very highly. Now that we see that we are close to achieving it, I enjoy it even more. It is a historic moment for the club and very important for the city [of less than 50,000 inhabitants]. I live it with enthusiasm and without pressure,” explains Genís in conversation with ARA. With twelve points advantage over the second, St. Gallen, with only six matchdays left – including those of the final phase – before the end of the competition, glory is within reach.

Whistles at Egypt's anthem, chants of “Muslim who doesn’t jump!”, insults to Pedro Sánchez and the essential “Spanish Gibraltar!”. What is this if not Torrente going to Cornellà-El Prat yesterday to cheer on the Spanish team?Bring, bring the Spanish team to Catalonia, so that all the Vox voters come out to make racist chants.Racist and stupid. Because, as an Ara reader says today in their comments, “you have to be an idiot to go to see a match of your team, start shouting racist cries and chants, and end up insulting the best player on your own team.” Because, of course, these patriots have forgotten that if there is a player who can decisively contribute to Spain winning the World Cup again one day, it is a player named Lamine Yamal and he is Muslim. Not to mention whistling the Barça goalkeeper and former Espanyol player Joan Garcia on his debut for the national team. And they were not minority chants. At the end of the match, when asked about racism and xenophobia, the coach Luis de la Fuente (the one who applauded Rubiales on the day of “I am not going to resign”) replied that these people, “the further away from society, the better.” Impossible for them to be far away, they are society. They are a fraction of society that has a voice and a vote (Vox in Spain) which is a vote that is very much in line with their voice.

"I used to work in a publishing house called Linkgua at 45 Muntaner street. I was an editor and proofreader. And one day at the door I meet a lady about 80 years old, Carme Humet Cocinero. And she asks me if I can hug her because she hasn't hugged a black person in 40 years," explains Arsenio Rodríguez Quintana (Havana, 1964). Rodríguez hugged her and asked why she had asked. "She told me that her aunt, Maria Cocinero, had married a black Cuban named Longinos Betancourt who was a doorman in a building in Urquinaona. And she added that the son of this couple had played for Barça. It blew my mind. I knew nothing, and I'm Cuban, black, and a Barça fan," he adds. "Thus began Rodríguez's investigation to publicize the figure of Francesc SiscuBetancourt y Cocinero (1913-1998), the first black player in Barça's history. "Betancourt came to find me. It was a sign. Unfortunately, his family wasn't very interested in remembering Siscu's figureand they threw away many documents. I'm very sorry. So I had to investigate," explains Rodríguez, who has just published Ciscu Betancourt, first black footballer of Barça and the Spanish league, a book to vindicate this player who defended the jersey of a lot of Catalan teams. He debuted at Fort Pienc in the 20s and in 1961 he was still linked to football at Sant Cugat, where he coached. In between, good spells at Barça, Sabadell or Badalona, even scoring a goal against Real Madrid with the blaugrana jersey.

Kylian Mbappé has suffered a series of physical ailments this season, forcing him to miss important matches. After a period of absence and a gradual return, his knee injury has once again put the spotlight on Real Madrid's medical management. In fact, according to French journalist Daniel Riolo, the club's medical staff may have made an error in the initial diagnosis of the player's injury, delaying his recovery by analyzing images of his right knee when the injury was actually in his left.

The Canary Islands referee Juan Luis Pulido Santana has sparked a new controversy following statements made on the Rogue Cast podcast, in which he harshly criticized former Catalan referee Xavier Estrada Fernández, whom he described as "a wretch" and "a sinister character." But the issue isn't just the insult itself, but the underlying message. During the interview, Pulido explicitly introduced a particularly sensitive element: Estrada's political ideology: "Now he's playing the nationalist, a total Catalan, but he was certainly getting paid by the Spanish Football Federation," he stated. He then added a highly symbolic remark: "When he officiated the Copa del Rey final, he had to bow down to the national anthem."

"It was almost like winning the Champions League. For any other team, it would have been just another victory, but for us, it's our first and it could be our last. What we endured was tough, quite difficult, but it was worth it," explains Sergi Pont (1998). Ribera de Ondara, the club from a town in the Segarra region with fewer than 500 inhabitants, recently broke a streak of 31 defeats and 412 days without a point with a hard-fought 4-3 victory against Santa Coloma de Queralt B, thanks to a brace from Pont. Their last win had been on January 11, 2025. This season, they had suffered seventeen defeats in seventeen matches in the fourth tier of Catalan football, the lowest division, with eight goals for and 98 against, including some particularly painful results: 13-0, 10-9, 2-10, 7-0. "When the referee blew the whistle, we couldn't believe it. We were all laughing, all shouting like mad, all freaking out. Our faces were beaming with joy and happiness," he says.

Alba Caño was born in 2003 in Puiggròs, a tiny village in Les Garrigues, where a deep passion for football grew from a very young age. She learned to play at the Les Garrigues Football School, later played for a few seasons with AEM Lleida, and at just fifteen years old, joined Barça, where she even played for the first team in the last two seasons. But to gain the playing time that the Barça stars weren't giving her, she decided to radically change teams. Since January, she has been a midfielder for Boston Legacy FC, a newly formed team in the American professional league (the NWSL)

The Hope League. Not all projects are named in a way that accurately reflects their underlying idea, but in this case, the name is perfectly chosen. The Hope League It's a project that uses football to unite the neighbors of northern Syria and Iraq, where years of war and religious fanaticism have caused so much damage. "In cities like Raqqa, we've managed to get members of families with ISIS militants to participate in the project, along with communities persecuted by ISIS," explains former Barça player Oleguer Presas. Chasing a ball, boys and girls from a region where hatred between communities and religions has left thousands dead, were creating hope. But in recent weeks, hatred has overtaken their dreams. The Syrian government's military escalation against the Kurdish autonomous region has changed everything.

The disallowed goal by Lamine Yamal has reopened the debate about the reliability of the SAOT system, the semi-automatic offside technology that determines whether a player is in an illegal position. This tool has been implemented in La Liga since the 2024-25 season and represents a significant improvement over the previous system, in which referees manually drew the lines. The system is called semi-automatic because it requires human intervention to resolve the play. The role of the VAR official is to determine the exact moment when the striker's teammate last touches the ball. From there, the program calculates whether the position is legal. In certain situations, the referee can choose between one or two options. framesSince slow-motion images make it difficult to establish with absolute precision when the ball last touches the player's foot, referees never know in advance how the play will unfold. To expedite the process and increase reliability, the ball would need to incorporate an official chip that would allow the exact moment of the last touch to be determined. However, La Liga rejected this option for economic reasons, as well as the implementation of a clock that alerts the referee when the ball has completely crossed the goal line in cases of phantom goals. A headache for the CTA (Technical Committee of Referees).

Hawk-Eye, the company responsible for the semi-automatic offside system, provides the broadcast team with a graphic representation to justify the VAR decision. The problem is that the shortcomings of this simulation raise more questions than answers: the mannequins are all the same height, wear the same shoes, and lack features like hair, which detracts from the image's realism. One of the most surreal representations occurred during last season's Real Sociedad-Barcelona match, when Robert Lewandowski's disproportionately large foot was shown to justify an offside call. This Sunday, also at Anoeta, an image was circulated showing Lamine Yamal perfectly aligned with the defender, but a second test had to be sent out, revealing that part of his heel was slightly forward.

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Nàstic's trajectory since the unexpected dismissal of Dani Vidal as first-team coach at the end of last season is more than worrying. Vidal was a coach who had connected with the fans, and the chances of fighting for promotion were still very much alive, but the club's board decided to fire him and bring back a historic coach, the architect of their promotion to La Liga, the Galician Luis César, with the sole objective of lifting the team out of the Primera Federación (Second Division). But Real Sociedad's reserve team dashed their hopes.

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The Africa Cup of Nations ended in a heartbreaking defeat for Morocco on Sunday. The host nation played the final at home, seemingly poised for victory against Senegal, but lost in extra time after conceding a stunning goal from Villarreal midfielder Pape Gueye. Beyond the scoreline, which left the crowd at the Moulay Abdellah Stadium in Rabat reeling, the final's events cast a particularly harsh shadow over the Moroccan team, who, 24 hours after the final whistle, are still struggling to come to terms with the loss. Below, we review the embarrassing moments associated with what has been the most controversial Africa Cup of Nations final in recent memory.

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As is now tradition, the first official title of the year decided in Spanish football is the Spanish Super Cup. It is contested by the best teams of the previous season, which in this case are once again Barça – the reigning La Liga and Copa del Rey champions –, Real Madrid – the reigning La Liga and Copa del Rey runners-up –, Atlético de Madrid, and Athletic Club. The anomaly for the past few years has been the location of the semifinals and final: Saudi Arabia. By virtue of a multi-million euro agreement brokered by Gerard Piqué, which is currently being challenged in court, the Super Cup is played in the Arab country, which in recent years has injected a huge amount of money into football through a sovereign wealth fund. In fact, it will host the 2030 Men's World Cup. Most of the players participating in this edition of the Super Cup accept that money takes precedence over the fans who fill La Liga stadiums every weekend. However, Iñaki Williams, one of Athletic Club's key players, has spoken out to criticize the tournament's continued location so far from Barcelona, ​​Madrid, and Bilbao, where the participating teams are based this year. In public statements this Tuesday, the Navarrese striker was very clear in his assessment: "I've said it many times, and I don't mince words on these issues. For me, playing in Saudi Arabia is rubbish, to put it bluntly," said Williams, who elaborated on his country's history, not to mention the travel. "We [Athletic], because it's so much about socializing, feel like we're playing away from home."

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Life's twists and turns bring us together in the heart of El Vendrell. He's come to visit his family after a very intense year in Finland. Few believed he could make it. But with a fearless style and an extremely attacking mentality, 91 goals in 38 official matches, Ivan Piñol (1982) has overcome financial difficulties to achieve an unexpected promotion. Five years after being relegated, Turun Palloseura will once again compete in the Veikkausliiga, the top tier of Finnish football. It's been intense, but after many obstacles, he has found success in a country that has always welcomed him and embraces his courage. "Football is about emotions, and the greatest emotions arise when goals are celebrated. If we wanted to make some noise, we had to play rock 'n' roll. Attack, attack, and attack again," he says.

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