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Last Friday night, Spain’s women’s team played their first game since Luis Rubiales was found guilty of sexual assault for kissing Jenni Hermoso after the 2023 Women’s World Cup final.
Spain came from 2-0 down against Belgium in Valencia with 20 minutes left to win a thrilling game 3-2. Hermoso was not involved, having again been left out of the squad by coach Montse Tome. But she was on the minds of many.
A woman and her daughter went to the match to give support to Jennifer Hermoso, even though she was not in the call-up. A day earlier, judge Jose Manuel Clemente Fernandez-Prieto found Rubiales, the former president of the Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), guilty of sexual assault and issued him with a fine of more than €10,000 for the kiss on Hermoso as she received her World Cup winners’ medal.
The judge found Rubiales and his three co-defendants – former women’s coach Jorge Vilda, ex-Spain men’s team sporting director Albert Luque and former Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) marketing director Ruben Rivera – not guilty of coercion for their efforts to persuade Hermoso to publicly say she had consented to the kiss. Rubiales intends to appeal the decision.
The two-week trial at Spain’s Audiencia Nacional, the country’s high court, in San Fernando de Henares near Madrid, demonstrated the RFEF’s lack of respect for Hermoso and her team-mates, going back long before the World Cup.
That was what the players still earn the minimum salary of any Spaniard. There was no real advance.
The new agreement signed recently for the women’s players was promoted as a great step forward. But the players still earn the minimum salary of any Spaniard. There was no real advance.
The new board of 30 directors features 15 women, as mandated by Spanish law. These include Liga F president Beatriz Alvarez Mesa and Maria Jose Rienda, a former head of the government’s Superior Sports Council (CSD).
“We’re going to continue in the line of unity, consensus, hard work and absolute transparency,” Louzan told an assembly meeting that took place during the trial. “The moment has come to do everything that could not be done until now. We’ve initiated a transformation process for this institution, which needs to modernise and adapt to new trends.”
The word from the RFEF is that this is a new era, that the guilty verdict should allow all involved to draw a line and move on. It is not so simple.
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