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La Liga Execs Express Satisfaction With Long-Awaited Passing Of Real Decreto

Spanish Football League clubs expressed satisfaction over the passing of the Real Decreto law regarding the sale of TV rights. Atlético Madrid President Enrique Cerezo said that the move was a "very positive step." Cerezo "[This law] will convert La Liga into a more competitive league, because clubs will be able to invest in players, sporting infrastructure and the academy." Levante President Francisco Catalán said, "We feel a lot of satisfaction, it is a historic day for Spanish football." Espanyol President Joan Collet said, "We've fought for many years for this rule to come to fruition and it means that the best league in the world now has the same distribution of revenue as the other great European leagues." Meanwhile, Rayo Vallecano President Raúl Martín Presa called the approval of the law "important," but explained "this first step is just the start. The second challenge is to launch a full-frontal attack on piracy" (LFP). REUTERS' González & O'Leary reported the approval of the law "ends the previous system in which rights were sold by individual clubs and could lead to a sharp price increase for broadcasters." The previous system "heavily favoured big teams" such as Real Madrid and Barcelona. While the new set-up will "still favour the biggest and most successful clubs, it will do so to a slightly lesser extent." Smaller teams, "especially those with big tax bills, have for years called for rights to be pooled to help them make ends meet and had threatened to strike over the issue." La Liga, where the broadcast rights for most individual clubs have been bought by privately owned Mediapro, "is the only top European league in which clubs negotiate their own TV contracts." Analysts calculate that clubs will collectively obtain $1.1B per season, versus around €700M ($780M) currently. In Spain "those likely to buy the rights" are telecom Telefónica or Mediapro (REUTERS, 4/30).

LONG TIME COMING: In Madrid, Alfredo Relaño wrote in an editorial Spain "required less time to knock together a Constitution than it has taken to put in place a decree governing the distribution of television rights among football clubs." The Constitution took 16 months to be drawn up, "counting the days from the very first meeting of those seven great men and the submission to the Spanish parliament of a text that has served Spain for the past 40 years." This royal decree regulating the distribution of television revenue has taken "much longer to come to pass -- a full legislature of the Spanish government in fact." It has been necessary to "first untangle a web of vested interests, whose Gordian knot was for some time located in the VIP box at Real Madrid, through which numerous government ministers, ex-ministers and candidates regularly pass, and then moved though the cautious ultraliberal sector, the economic bard of this conservative government." Then the int'l effect of the caprices of Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) President Ángel María Villar had to be gauged. In "the end it was achieved: a collective bargaining agreement and a more equitable split." And it is "most welcome." This royal decree includes a "solidary breakaway by football toward the rest of the sporting sphere, which to an extent will serve to compensate the money that the Spanish state has removed from the rest of the sporting federations." It will be a step toward "moderating the financial advantage of Real Madrid and Barcelona, whose share of the rights has allowed them to spend shamefully extravagant amounts of money, proportionally bringing what the two richest clubs and the least fortunate earn closer together." There will "be complaints of course, but as far as I can see what is around the corner is infinitely better than the status quo until now" (AS, 5/1).

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