The fact that Barça president Joan Laporta held his first major campaign rally during the club's Christmas dinner is beside the point. A president is always campaigning, and besides, any Barça fan agrees with what he said about Real Madrid: that they have "acute barcelonitis".The reasons are clear: Barça outplayed Real Madrid last season as many times as they wanted, despite signing Mbappé; in the summer, Real Madrid changed coaches and are now second, four points behind Barça; and the Real Madrid president needs to downplay the fiasco of the new Bernabéu and the future sale of part of the club's ownership. But beyond these immediate reasons, the day Barça abandoned the Super League project and returned to UEFA, Florentino Pérez and Laporta stopped working together. That's why we're back to a free-for-all for presidential hostilities. Nevertheless, Barça members should be more demanding when it comes to clarifying what happened in the Negreira case. No referee has admitted to having acted in a way that favored Barça. Coaches like Luis Enrique and Valverde have testified before the judge that they never saw a report, but the reports existed, and according to all reports, Barça paid Negreira almost eight million euros between 2001 and 2018. It's one thing for Real Madrid not to be in a position to lecture on refereeing neutrality or to want to distort history; it's another for us not to question the path that money took, if, as it seems, it didn't influence the competition. Who benefited?

Luis Enrique Martínez, Ernesto Valverde, and Joan Laporta testified on Friday as witnesses in the Negreira case. Both former Barcelona coaches stated—via video call—that they were unaware of the existence of the reports from the former vice-president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) and his son. They claimed that Valverde had received similar services while at Athletic Bilbao. Joan Laporta, however—who was acquitted in the case because the statute of limitations had expired for the acts committed during his first term (2003-2010)—admitted in court that they found these reports "by chance in some boxes at the back of a cupboard," as revealed by SER Catalunya. However, only some of the reports were found, because, according to the Barcelona president, part of the club's documentation is destroyed every five or six years.

Sandro Rosell only testified for 15 minutes before the judge, but it was enough time to leave the main character of the day in court. "With Messi and Piqué at Barça, we didn't have to pay Negreira," the former Barça president declared, according to Efe, at the courthouse. It was an intense morning at the City of Justice in Hospitalet de Llobregat, which also saw the presence of another former Barça president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, and Javier Enríquez Romero, the son of José María Enríquez Negreira, the former vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA). Between father and son, Barça paid a total of 7.3 million euros between 2001 and 2018.