For those of you struggling to understand why Jenni Hermoso and the innapropriateness of Luis Rubiales has infuriated women everywhere and why the Spanish women’s team are making a stand. I give you Casey Stoney: pic.twitter.com/pOIcgF5mYo — Emma (@WhatTheForkLads) August 25, 2023 Yes, I have been paying attention to this story, but there have been …
This brings us, more or less, to Friday’s breathtakingly deranged RFEF assembly, at which Rubiales … fucking hell, where even to begin with this guy. Well, let’s see. He repeatedly refused to resign, for one thing, at one point roaring it several times in a row like he’s in friggin’ The Wolf of Wall Street. He also offered Vilda a new four-year contract paying him a higher salary than that of literally any woman soccer player in the world. That is not even the half of it.
Rubiales named critics—all women—who have described the kiss as an assault, and vowed legal action against them. He called the kiss “spontaneous, mutual, and consensual”—you might notice this harmonizes with the fake Hermoso statement—and even blamed it on Hermoso, saying “She was the one who lifted me up and brought me closer to her body. And I said to her, ‘A little bit?’ and she said, ‘OK.'” He called the reaction to the kiss a “social assassination” and said his critics are trying to kill him…
Nearly as appalling as Rubiales’s lunatic tirade was the sight of Vilda and men’s national team manager Luis de la Fuente in the audience, applauding this dogshit. They aren’t alone among powerful men and institutions in Spanish soccer showing their whole asses today: As of this writing, Luis Enrique, former men’s national team coach and current boss at Paris Saint-Germain, has spoken out in Rubiales’s defense, after the speech; so has Joan Soteras, head of the Catalan Football Federation (FCF). FC Barcelona, which reportedly has benefited from Rubiales’s help in sorting out its myriad Financial Fair Play problems, issued a disgracefully weak statement, denouncing Rubiales’s behavior at the World Cup but crediting him, ridiculously, with having “admitted it was an error” and apologizing. (Casting Barcelona in an even worse light, RCD Espanyol, Barça’s relegated crosstown rival, had the bare-minimal awareness and self-respect to condemn both Rubiales’s World Cup behavior and his shameful display at the RFEF assembly, and to call for his immediate dismissal.)
Meanwhile, players themselves are reacting with horror, outrage, and unity…
Awful and repellent as Rubiales’s speech was, this may well turn out to have been a positive development overall, or at least the lesser of some number of evils. In combination with the World Cup win, a hasty and quiet resignation by Rubiales risked making Spain’s national soccer infrastructure and culture look healthier and more progressive than they actually are, and may have allowed the media and public to metabolize this whole sequence of events as merely the story of a single monstrous indiscretion—attributable perhaps to a joyful and tragically over-voluptuous Latinate heart—followed by an appropriately chastened and modern response. Now, with Rubiales having had nearly a week to formulate his next move, and with that next move having been, in total, a great big chesty fuck-you to decency and accountability, no one in the world can even halfway credibly pretend not to see the situation for what it is…
This is what Spain’s players were trying to bring to the world’s attention, a great big system of disrespect, unprofessionalism, and gross incompetence, which includes but is far from limited to one manager or federation president. In the work of doing so and in absolutely no other sense, Rubiales now turns out to have been perhaps their single greatest ally.
If twitter is an indicator, it doesn’t seem like Rubiales’ behavior can be discretely swept under the carpet.
🔴 NEWS || The players of the Spanish soccer club Cádiz CF came out with the banner 'We are all Jenni' to support Jenni Hermoso against the macho Luis Rubiales.#Cadiz #Spain #JenniHermoso #LuisRubiales pic.twitter.com/FZrqzVTU9h
— Docendo Updates 🌎 (@omotkn) August 26, 2023
"fist instead of kiss for rubiales and rummenigge. sorry, with respect, that's perfectly okay"
respect to sc freiburg fans pic.twitter.com/f8gpCGhph4
— mapi (@loberdorf6) August 26, 2023
Football fans offer their views on whether Luis Rubiales should resign with most saying he should go 👇
One fan said his actions were "horrific" and another said he should resign "regardless of whether there was consent or not".
Read more: https://t.co/IKAbsGhhDd pic.twitter.com/zgLLGreh0g
— Sky News (@SkyNews) August 27, 2023