La Liga is home to some of the best teams in Europe. Two stalwarts of football, Barcelona and Real Madrid play in the league, and their rivalry is what makes La Liga even more special. However, over the years, the league has seen a lot of controversial decisions. The management has been put under the spotlight because of a few incidents and this has affected the league’s image over the past few seasons.
Yesterday’s El Classico encounter between Real Madrid and Barcelona proved to be yet another example of how far off La Liga is as compared to the Premier League. Both these sides were playing some great football and fans were thoroughly entertained. But a controversial decision was made in the 28th minute when Lamine Yamal‘s sneaky touch that seemed to have crossed the goal line was denied by the referees.
Normally such a decision would be taken after looking at the goal line technology. However, La Liga does not have that and this decision was left at the hands of VAR [Video Assistant Referee.] Yamal’s effort was a close one, but there were no conclusive angle that showed the ball crossing the line. After looking at the incident, VAR denied the goal for Barca and this led to the game staying 1-1.
The Bluagranas did take a lead through Fermin Lopez in the 69th minute, but Madrid came from behind and took a 3-2 win. The highlight of the night should have been the exciting game, but the goal-line incident is what is at the forefront of the debate among football fans on social media.
La Liga needs to improve on technology
LA Liga is one of the only top-tier leagues that has not implemented the goal-line technology. This is due to Javier Tebas’ reluctance to pay 2.6 million, which is required to bring this technology to Spain. After the game, a lot of fans took to Twitter to express their disappointment in not having the goal-line technology to determine whether Yamal’s effort was a goal or not.
Javier Tebas was quick to respond to them by captioning “No comments” with a series of articles that show how this technology has failed in some of the other leagues. However, not having a technology that can determine big results just because of the risk of failing is also not right. The goal-line technology has been a big help in many other leagues and La Liga needs to revisit their decision about not having it in their league.
