Luis Rubiales kiss scandal not a wake-up call, but a punch in the face of governing bodies

So you know how it would all end. The accused, acquitted and painted innocent, delivering a moving speech on victimhood and mental trauma, touching upon the ordeal his family faces, the world sympathizing with him and haunting the alleged victim. The suspended—not banned or dismissed—chief of Spanish Football Luis Rubiales has been through this once. Three years ago, Yasmina Eid-Macche, an architect who renovated his house, accused him of assault and non-payment.

A year later, he was cleared of both charges. To the pack of journalists waiting outside the courtroom, he broke down and said: “I express my deepest sympathy and solidarity to whoever has been victims of blackmail, extortion or harassment by someone, such as this tremendous harassment this lady had done to me.” Two months later, he would allege that there had been a concerted “campaign to discredit him”. “I cannot guarantee one day they will put a bag of cocaine in the boot of my car!”

After the kiss scandal—when Rubiales grabbed the head, and kissed footballer Jenni Hermoso on the lips, allegedly without her consent after the World Cup final in Sydney on 20 August—he has again played the victim card. “It’s a witch hunt by false feminists,” he would rant, before asserting that he “will continue to defend myself to prove the truth.” His mother had gone on a hunger strike, and was hospitalized, and despite mounting voices of criticism, there is a rising wave of sympathy in certain quarters of the faction-ridden Spanish football fraternity.

Even in his faint apology—“I committed some evident mistakes, for which I sincerely repent,”—there was no sense of owning up to what the world has seen live and photographed. He insisted the kiss was “mutual, consensual and