One of the biggest matches of the season lies ahead of Real Madrid and Manchester City, but in Spain the Champions League itself is playing second fiddle to another topic. Jude Bellingham told a referee to “f– off.” Or maybe he said “f— you.” Is which of those he said important? Does either merit a potentially lengthy ban? And most of all, is there a difference between these two phrases in English that means Bellingham shouldn’t have gotten a red card.
Bellingham, the match winner when Madrid and City met on Tuesday in England, saw red on Saturday for whatever it was he said to referee Jose Luis Munuera Montero in the 39th minute of the 1-1 draw with Osasuna. The player insisted he had been letting out an exasperated cry of “f— off.” Montero said he heard the altogether more personalized “f— you”. Carlo Ancelotti backed his man, dismissing the incident as a misunderstanding. Barcelona boss Hansi Flick branded Bellingham “disrespectful.” Spanish media dived headfirst into a debate on semantics.
Returning from Manchester to his home country, Pep Guardiola, nearly nine years in England as City head coach, seemed as well qualified as anyone to assess. He is as at ease conducting his press conferences in English as he is Spanish. Could he shed light on the whole situation? Unfortunately not.
“My English is good but I’ve never understood ‘f– off’ or ‘f— you’, so give me a little bit more time in England so I will maybe understand it more.
“You should ask Jude [Bellingham] what his intention was: F— you, or F— off — that’s what really matters. Maybe you can attack someone with a big smile on your face, and that wouldn’t be so bad, right?”
As for suggestions that Montero should face an investigation, Guardiola was even more forthright. “Leave him alone. Leave him alone. It’s the best thing we can do,” he said.
Such an intervention seems unlikely to quell the Bellingham debate or the wider one of the refereeing of Madrid games that it plays into. La Liga’s leaders — who have received eight more penalties than have been given against them this season — formally complained to the Spanish football association earlier this month following a 1-0 defeat to Osasuna. In that game, the winner had been scored by Carlos Romero, who Madrid believed should already have been sent off for a bad tackle on Kylian Mbappe. A penalty awarded to Atletico in the Spanish capital derby a week later did little to improve their moods.
Ancelotti, normally a man who could extinguish social media fires with his cool, was not afraid of firing a shot across the bows of La Liga officials. Asked if he expected a better refereeing performance in the Champions League, where Hungarian Istvan Kovacs will lead the crew, the Real Madrid manager said, “The statistics speak for themselves. There are fewer VAR interventions, only when it’s necessary.
“What’s happening is quite surprising and I have nothing else to say. We’re obviously not happy with it, with what happened against Osasuna, what happened against Atletico. It’s been three games where we have been harmed by some decisions that we still don’t understand. I don’t understand.”
Guardiola sees no cause for concern in whether the very active discourse around Madrid’s refereeing will affect the game, insisting he “rarely, rarely, rarely” discusses the officials with his players. Instead, he is focused on overturning a 3-2 deficit as City look to become only the third of 40 teams to lose a first-leg game at home to Madrid and still advance into the next round of European competition.
“The pressure is there,” he said, “But it’s more than welcome; you cannot perform well without pressure. [Whether we win] depends on how we play, how we handle the moments in one of the biggest stadiums. The bad moments that you have to suffer will be there and we will try to reduce them as much as possible.
“You have to play an almost perfect game. The result was not so good [in the first leg], we usually come intou the second leg with a better result, so it is not the perfect situation. We have to attack, we have to score goals. We want to win, so let’s see if we can adjust some things that didn’t work in the first leg.”
