Tomás Guasch Criticizes La Liga Refereeing After Real Madrid Defeat

Spanish journalist Tomás Guasch has launched a ferocious attack on La Liga refereeing after Real Madrid’s 1-0 defeat to Real Betis, accusing VAR officials of acting with “bad faith” and targeting the club’s goals.

Speaking on YouTube with content creator Ricardo Ramos Nera, in remarks later carried by Defensa Central, Guasch painted a picture of a league where every Real Madrid goal is treated as suspicious by default.

“With every Real goal that doesn't come from a shot from 40 metres, they replay the footage on VAR and look for an excuse to disallow it,” he complained. “There must be someone whose only job is to follow the Madrid goals.”

He claimed that VAR teams obsessively rewind incidents until they can find a technicality.

“They replay the footage. They rewind two or three times until they find that the player was in an offside position,” he said. “I'm telling you they wouldn't disallow this goal if it were for another team. It goes on like that, replay after replay, until they finally find a pass in which the player was ahead.”

Fury over Espí’s disallowed header

The flashpoint that lit the fuse was the offside call against Carlos Espí late on against Betis. In the 87th minute, the forward rose to meet a cross with a superb header that looked to have rescued Real Madrid.

Espí had been picked out by Vinícius on the right flank. On the pitch, referee Hernández Hernández awarded the goal. Up in the booth, Iglesias Villanueva had control of the VAR screens. Minutes later, the goal was gone.

For Guasch, that sequence summed up everything.

“Now you have someone up there, and I don't know how many assistants are alongside him, and three or four screens in front of him. There can be no mistake,” he insisted. “No, they say ‘he interpreted it’... Stop interpreting, and stop twisting the language in this way, and talking about grey areas, the intensity of the challenge, and excessive force... all of this is a distortion of reality.”

Guasch, who works with Cadena COPE and writes for El Debate, did not soften his verdict.

“They act in bad faith, and I am absolutely certain of that,” he said.

The veteran reporter, one of the few who still regularly criticises the Negreira case, went further, describing the officials as an adversary in their own right.

“In front of you, you have your sporting opponent, then you have the biggest enemies, and those are these people, especially the VAR men, isn't that right?” he continued. “When I say VAR commandos, that's the truth.”

Mbappé penalty adds fuel to the fire

Guasch also seized on another key episode: Kylian Mbappé’s missed penalty, with Marc Bartra encroaching into the area before the French striker struck the ball.

For him, the decision not to order a retake was not a mistake. It was a choice.

“They don't retake the penalty because they don't want to,” he said bluntly. “The person up there already knows what he has to do, and they have invented a rule... They have violated the international rule, and on top of that it goes against common sense.”

He then broke down the play in detail, focusing again on Bartra’s role.

“Bartra... does he affect the play? Yes, because he's the player who arrives to prevent or obstruct Mbappé's shot, and therefore... listen to me carefully... you said a month ago that this is a penalty and it must be retaken, so why do you interfere in this case?”

For Guasch, the answer is clear: the real power no longer sits with the referee on the pitch.

“So who holds the decision in refereeing? The person on the video technology, and that's it. Nothing more than that,” he concluded.

A former deputy editor-in-chief at AS and ex-columnist at Marca, Guasch knows the Spanish game from the inside. His words won’t change any result, but they add another sharp voice to a season in which VAR is no longer just a tool – it has become the central character in the La Liga story.