‘Not Only’—Real Madrid President Eyes Unprecedented Sanctions Against Barcelona

Florentino Pérez is determined to keep the pressure on his rivals after winning re-election.

Real Madrid have requested that UEFA “strip Barcelona of their titles” between 2001–2018 as punishment for sporting corruption.

The revelations comes after Florentino Pérez won re-election as Real Madrid president on Sunday, beating challenger Enrique Riquelme 65-35 in the poll of the club’s members.

Pérez announced the elections ahead of schedule last month, while also revealing his plans to send a dossier to UEFA detailing the “biggest corruption case ever” with regards to the Negreira case—an ongoing investigation into payments made by Barcelona to a former vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees.

“The systemic corruption of the Negreira case … How can we just forget it?” Pérez said during hs press conference on May 12. “We’re preparing a 500-page dossier that I’ll send to UEFA when the competition is over. I’ve already spoken with them. There’s no precedent for this in the history of world football. It’s the biggest corruption case ever.”

After winning re-election in Sunday’s vote of club members, Pérez is continuing his focus on the Negreira case, with AS reporting he has now submitted his report to UEFA, while seeking serious punishment for his arch-rivals.

AS’s report claims that Madrid are “not only requesting a sanction against Barcelona that would prevent them from participating in European competitions. It goes further. Real Madrid seeks to have the titles won by the Catalan club during those years removed from their official record, so that the Blaugrana cannot boast about them.”

What Is the Negreira Case?

The scandal, which first came to light back in 2023, centers on €8.4 million ($9.9 million) in payments made by Barcelona to companies linked to José María Enríquez Negreira, once a La Liga referee and former vice-president of Spain’s Technical Committee of Referees (CTA).

Those payments were made over a 17-year period from 2001–2018. And while public official bribery charges were dropped in 2024 because Negreira was not considered one, the investigation continued under the guise of sports corruption instead.

Barcelona have always denied the payments were anything to do with allegations of ‘buying’ referees, with Negreira instead hired as a ‘consultant’ providing reports on youth players from rival clubs and reports related to professional refereeing.

Back in December 2025, it was reported that Real Madrid had begun pursuing legal action in the hope of claiming “millions in damages” over the unresolved case. After Pérez brought up the issue again in public during his May press conference, Barcelona claimed they were “carefully examining” the accusations made by the Real Madrid president and threatened their own legal action.

Could Barcelona Be Stripped of Titles?

What actually happens next remains to be seen.

UEFA has not definitively closed the matter and reportedly remains open to taking action once it has analyzed all the evidence.

Back in 2023, UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin described the case as: “In my opinion, one of the most serious I’ve ever seen in football.”

Catalan publication SPORT reports that Real Madrid is prepared to “go all the way” and is taking the case to the European level, with UEFA capable of levelling sanctions against Barcelona if found guilty of wrongdoing.

However, while UEFA could theoretically strip Barcelona of the four Champions Leagues titles won between 2001–2018, it has no jurisdiction over La Liga.

Removing any titles would also set a huge precedent for UEFA. European soccer’s governing body has never stripped a club of a title after winning the final.

Marseille won the 1993 Champions League and later became embroiled in a match-fixing scandal. They were stripped of their French league title and banned from defending their European crown, but UEFA did not take away their 1993 Champions League title because the proven match-fixing concerned a domestic league match, not European competition.

Meanwhile, Juventus were stripped of their 2004–05 and 2005–06 Serie A titles because of the Calciopoli scandal, but their UEFA competition results were not affected during the period.