Laporta come out fighting after club accused of paying referees to fix matches

There's never a dull day at Barcelona where president Joan Laporta can be hailed for fixing the finances, and urged to resign over the bribery scandal, all in the same day.

What kind of day will Sunday be? Well that depends on how Barcelona deal with Athletic Bilbao. If they win and go into next Saturday’s Clasico on good form then the mood will be good, until the next allegation drops of course.

Laporta claimed on Thursday that this is all a campaign against the club coming from dark forces in Madrid who want to destabilise the team that won LaLiga last season.

It’s certainly true that the investigating judge in the case against the club seems happy to disclose details of his process as he goes along, and that for now there is zero evidence Barcelona paid off referees to fix games. But it’s also undeniable that the club did pay Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira the sum of €7.3 million (£6.3m) from 2001 to 2018.

He was vice-president of the refereeing committee at the time with influence over which referees were promoted to officiate top games and which were demoted. ‘Logically’ (a word that the investigating judge has used on several occasions) it follows that everyone in Spanish football is finding it hard to believe the money was just for information reports on match officials as was originally claimed.

At first the club were being investigated for the crime of corruption but because Negreira worked for the Spanish Football Federation it's now been suggested he could be considered a civil servant during the time payments were being made to him and that means Barcelona could be charged with bribery on the basis that they were allegedly buying favours from government officials.

Under bribery laws in Spain, if the case goes to