Introduction
Between €7.3 million and €8.4 million. Over seventeen years. In connection with payments to José María Enríquez Negreira, former vice-chairman of the CTA (Technical Committee of Referees), Barcelona were formally placed under investigation for business corruption (corrupción en los negocios) on 28 October 2025. Distrust in La Liga's refereeing system is no longer confined to stadium chants; it is now a matter for the courts of Barcelona.
This article, however, is not about the Negreira affair itself. The question it asks is different: in the shadow cast by that case, how has the system designed to evaluate La Liga's referees actually been built? Since the summer of 2025, a multi-layered feedback framework – largely unknown outside Spain – has been assembled at remarkable speed. Without understanding the structure, any criticism of it is bound to miss the mark. First, the blueprint.
Chapter 1 – Match-by-Match Evaluation: Observers and AI
Every La Liga match is attended by a CTA-appointed match observer, invisible to the stands. Their job is to grade the performance of the referee, assistant referees, and VAR officials on a game-by-game basis; those reports feed directly into match assignments and end-of-season promotion and relegation. Ahead of the 2025-26 season, three referees were promoted to the top flight and three were removed from the first-division panel and reassigned to dedicated VAR duties. Evaluation runs on numbers.
From 2025-26, artificial intelligence has been woven into this evaluation process. According to Mundo Deportivo (4 August 2025), AI analysis accounts for roughly 30 per cent of the overall grade, focusing primarily on the accuracy of foul and yellow-card decisions. Patterns that the human eye tends to overlook – a particular referee's tendency to card in a particular phase of play, for instance – are surfaced by the data.
The body responsible for defining and overseeing the AI's evaluation criteria is the Expert Committee (Comisión de Expertos). Its members are former manager Cuco Ziganda (José Ángel "Cuco" Ziganda), Sevilla FC (participating as a club representative), former Spain international Álvaro Negredo, and three former referees: Bernabé, Lesma López, and Marcos Álvarez. Four perspectives – refereeing experience, coaching, a club, and a former player – sit at the same table. Crucially, this committee is a separate organisation from the selection panel of "Tiempo de Revisión", the subject of the next chapter. The layer that evaluates and the layer that discloses are kept apart.
Chapter 2 – Tiempo de Revisión: The Public Review Experiment
On 11 September 2025, immediately after the opening round of the 2025-26 La Liga season, the CTA launched a programme. "Tiempo de Revisión" is a weekly broadcast in which notable decisions are reviewed on camera and CTA spokesperson Marta Frías explains whether each call was correct. Errors are labelled plainly as errors. The CTA itself described the initiative as "historically unprecedented" (inédita).
The panel that selects which incidents to review each matchday is distinct from the Expert Committee discussed above. It comprises former managers José Luis Oltra, José Ramón Sandoval, and José Luis Sánchez Vera, together with former Spain international Fernando Morientes. Players who once stood on the receiving end of big calls and coaches who spent careers reading games tactically now decide which moments should be held up to public scrutiny. As of 10 March 2026, twenty-four episodes (Programa 24) have been released.
Tiempo de Revisión does not stand alone. At least three parallel transparency measures are running alongside it. First, the VAR audio disclosure system: launched in January 2024 during the Supercopa de España and from Matchday 20 of the league, it makes public the dialogue between the on-field referee and the VAR official whenever an on-field review (OFR) takes place. Second, the timing of referee appointments has been moved from roughly a week before the match to 4 p.m. the day before kick-off, aiming to reduce pre-match pressure on the assigned official. Third, a "humanisation" (humanizar) initiative that replaces the double-surname convention that had persisted since the Franco era – "Gil Manzano", for example – with a single surname or a first-name-plus-surname format such as "Jesús Gil". No longer a badge number; a name.
All of these reforms accelerated after Fran Soto's appointment as CTA chairman in July 2025. The departure of his predecessor, Medina Cantalejo, brought a wholesale change of CTA leadership, and Soto moved quickly. The timeline, however, deserves attention. Soto took office in July; Tiempo de Revisión launched in September; Negreira's formal placement under investigation came on 28 October. The reforms are better understood not as a consequence of the Negreira affair but as a parallel current running through the same climate of distrust.
Chapter 3 – A Dedicated VAR Corps and the Seeds of a Coach's Challenge
Under the old system, a La Liga referee who took charge of a match one weekend might sit in the VAR room the next. In 2025-26, the CTA broke that rotation. A new unit called VAR-PRO, comprising fifteen dedicated VAR officials, was created to handle VAR duties across the first and second divisions. A separate performance analysis team determines which VAR official is assigned to each fixture. On-field referees hone on-field skills; VAR officials hone VAR skills. Specialisation by role.
Another experiment has begun at the grassroots of Spanish football. FVS (Football Video Support) is a FIFA-approved, simplified alternative to full VAR. It was introduced in Liga F (the women's top flight) and Primera Federación (roughly the third tier) from the 2025-26 season. Its most distinctive feature is a coach's challenge system: each manager may request a video review up to twice per match, retaining the right if the challenge succeeds.
What about the top flight? For now, FVS remains at the discussion stage within an RFEF working group on refereeing reform. Its application to La Liga is no more than a seed. But as operational data accumulates from Liga F, the conversation is likely to accelerate. The system is growing from the bottom up.
Conclusion
On 9 March 2026, the first collective labour agreement in the history of Spanish football refereeing was signed between the RFEF and AESAF (the Spanish Football Referees' Association). It includes expanded insurance coverage, injury and illness protection, and post-retirement career development through La Academia and the LaLiga Business School, with the next agreement targeting a longer-term horizon through 2030. LaLiga president Javier Tebas participated in the negotiations, but as he himself put it, he was there "with a voice but without a vote" (con voz, pero sin voto); the signatories were the RFEF and AESAF alone. A framework in which referees are institutionally protected as workers is, at last, beginning to take shape.
The system exists. Moreover, it has been assembled at speed in the shadow of the Negreira affair: AI-assisted evaluation, a public review broadcast, a dedicated VAR corps, the seeds of a coach's challenge, VAR audio disclosure, a labour agreement. All of these were launched within the past eighteen months. Yet this very "institutional rush" is, by implication, an admission of how fragile the framework had been before. The architecture has been designed. The next question is whether it actually works.
In the second part, "They Still Won't Go to the OFR"(coming 17 March), we examine the structural contradictions the system harbours – the chilling effect on VAR intervention, the asymmetry of recognised errors, and the duality of Atlético de Madrid's own position.