Overseas competition canceled! Huang Qian official: Expresses strong dissatisfaction with the poor management of La Liga’s organizational work

La Liga’s overseas games originally scheduled to be held in Miami were cancelled. Villarreal Club officially issued a statement expressing strong dissatisfaction with La Liga’s poor management of the organization of overseas games.

The statement is as follows:

Villarreal Football Club expresses strong dissatisfaction with the management issues that occurred during the La Liga match against Barcelona in Miami, USA. This match was originally scheduled to be played on December 20 as part of the 17th round of La Liga, but ultimately failed to be held in the United States.

This season, club president Fernando Roig and CEO Negro Rice have expressed their opinions on this matter at press conferences many times. Here the club would like to first review the timeline of the entire incident in detail: In order to promote the development of La Liga on a global scale, the league plans to hold a competition outside Spain. This summer, La Liga extended an invitation to Villarreal, scheduled before the Christmas holidays. Villarreal has publicly expressed its acceptance of this proposal many times, believing that it is of positive significance to the development of the club and the league, and also proposed two prerequisites that must be met:

1. La Liga must allocate funds for hosting overseas games to compensate Villarreal club season ticket holders who are affected by being unable to watch games that are included in their season tickets. The specific compensation plan includes: first, providing them with the opportunity to go to Miami for free to watch the game, and second, refunding part of the season ticket fees;

2. The two clubs participating in the overseas competition will not receive any direct economic benefits from La Liga, and this fund will be used exclusively to compensate Villarreal season ticket holders. Furthermore, it would be unfair to the other clubs in La Liga if these two clubs profited from it.

La Liga understood and accepted these requests, and Villarreal Football Club followed the instructions and formally submitted applications for overseas matches to all parties. As La Liga, as the responsible body and leader of the initiative, must apply for the necessary permissions and communicate all relevant information to all relevant parties, including the Spanish Football Federation, UEFA, FIFA and the Spanish Players Union.

Since discussions began in the summer about the possibility of overseas matches, Villarreal Football Club is prepared to fully cooperate with La Liga and emphasizes the importance of planning in advance to meet all relevant needs, given the logistical complexities of a match of this scale and the impact of large numbers of fans traveling across continents.

In view of the lack of progress in preparations for La Liga games, Villarreal Football Club has repeatedly expressed strong concerns and urged it to clarify the game time as soon as possible and entrust travel agencies to arrange basic work such as large-scale travel. But in fact, if the above problems are not solved immediately, the club will withdraw because the minimum conditions for organizational work cannot be guaranteed.

Last night, a few minutes before the start of the Champions League match between Villarreal and Manchester City at home, the club received a call from La Liga stating that the match was canceled due to the organizer's decision, but the information needed to be kept confidential and an opportunity would be chosen to make a joint announcement. However, a few minutes later, La Liga issued a unilateral statement announcing the cancellation of overseas games, which shocked the club, especially when Villarreal was preparing to participate in such an important game. The club felt that La Liga showed a huge lack of respect and empathy.

The Villarreal Club regrets that as the organizer of the event, La Liga failed to conduct better overall management, which ultimately resulted in the inability to proceed with overseas matches. We believe that this is a good opportunity to promote the development of the club and La Liga internationally. Nonetheless, Villarreal will continue to adhere to the established development guidelines and concepts and contribute to the progress of the club and the competition.