Tebas and Rubiales...it was all just a joke

Yes, it was all a big Día de los Inocentes ruse! I hope you took it in good humour. Contrary to our fun piece yesterday, Tebas and Rubiales were not seen in any Cistercian monastery, nor did they joke with each other about 'the few of us that there are and the bad blood'. Each of them instead has spent these recent days with their own, like everyone else. As it should be. I now use this column to ask them both for forgiveness for joking about their privacy over these days. I trust that both men see accept the good faith behind the joke, which had no other intention other than to bring the two great men of our football closer together, and get along.

And here I'm not speaking about the squabbles and bickering between the two. Here we have two men that function more or less the same. Each one has their own space for their specific football task. Obviously there are areas in which they overlap; that is inevitable. The intelligent thing though is to find the common ground in these moments of friction; a little give and take, and admit that there is a shared good which is football, that football that takes us from the huge clubs like Madrid and Barça, to those who battle in the modesty of more minor competitions, but with just as much dignity as the big ones.

In the end, everything is football, and Spanish football has something intimate, like an anthropological treasure, something that should be defended. The more Tebas runs from 'lesser' football in Spain, the more he will fall into the hands of that lavish 'Super League' idea that the Florentinos of this world aim to escape to. And the more you tie Rubiales down, the harder it will be for Tebas to keep LaLiga at the desired equilibrium. I hope my joke is taken as something more than a Christmas gesture of goodwill. I hope it encourages a collaboration that Spanish football desperately needs. And if not, let history demand it.