The LaLiga complaint Barcelona now face has turned the club’s first home league night of the season into a disciplinary matter.
Hansi Flick’s side beat Athletic Club 2-0 at the Spotify Camp Nou on Wednesday, but the league’s post-match report has logged five separate incidents from the stands and sent them on to Spanish football’s disciplinary machinery.
Per Barça Universal, relaying SPORT, LaLiga has referred the matter to the RFEF’s Competition Committee and to the Anti-Violence Commission, which will now assess whether anything that happened inside the ground is punishable.
What the LaLiga complaint Barcelona face actually covers
Two of the five logged incidents involve the same chant.
According to the league’s report, supporters in the Grada Gol 1957 section, within the Gol Sud, aimed a chant at Spain and the Spanish national team for roughly ten seconds around two minutes before kick-off. The same chant was heard again in the 18th minute, and lasted a similar length of time.
LaLiga considers the content of those chants potentially sanctionable, which is why they were written into the official post-match documentation rather than left out of it.
The remaining entries in the report cover chanting directed at the National Police and at Atlético Madrid — the latter unsurprising given the week Barça and the Rojiblancos have just had over Julián Álvarez.
It is worth being precise about what this is and is not. A league report is not a punishment. It is a referral, and the committees that receive it decide whether any charge follows. Clubs in Spain are routinely reported for crowd conduct and just as routinely see the file closed.
Why the Camp Nou looked and sounded like that
None of this happened in a vacuum. The previous Sunday, in Elche, a police intervention involving a young Barça supporter carrying an estelada triggered a furious response across the fanbase. The club condemned it in a statement, and Barça and the family of the boy involved are preparing criminal action against the officer, as reported by Mundo Deportivo.
We covered the original Elche incident when it broke.
The dispute followed the team home. The Assemblea Nacional Catalana handed out around 10,000 esteladas outside the ground, and the flags were visible all over the stands as the sides came out. Several hundred supporters demonstrated in the streets around the stadium before kick-off.
The club also cancelled a planned tribute to its eight World Cup winners rather than stage it in that atmosphere. President Joan Laporta framed the decision around the estelada as a symbol that “represents the way many culers and Catalans think”.
Pau Cubarsí, one of the players who would have been honoured, backed the call: “It has been a club decision. I think it is right, because of what happened in Elche; it is something that cannot happen again. There cannot be this excess of force,” he told TV3.
What happens next
The Competition Committee and the Anti-Violence Commission will work through the report in the coming days. Any sanction, if one arrives at all, would most likely take the form of a fine rather than anything touching the stadium itself, and Barça would have the right to appeal.
Flick, meanwhile, will be relieved that the football has been the least complicated part of the week. Raphinha and Fermín López scored, the performance against Athletic was as controlled as any in the early season, and the Blaugrana sit top of LaLiga with six points from six and no goals conceded. The noise around the club, on this occasion, was coming from somewhere other than the pitch.
