The forecast came true and Rafael Louzán is now the new president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation. The leader of the Galician Federation and former president of the Pontevedra Provincial Council has prevailed in the vote held in Las Rozas, the headquarters of the organization, over the Valencian Salvador Gomar. Extremaduran Sergio Merchán – who had presented himself as plan B in case Louzán’s judicial problems knocked down his candidacy – withdrew from the process just a few minutes before it got underway. Louzán is disqualified from holding public office after being convicted of prevarication by the Provincial Court of Pontevedra for a matter also related to football: he paid twice for an artificial grass field subsidized by the provincial entity. In February, the Supreme Court will decide on his appeal.
Although he was a key name in Galician politics for two decades, the beginning and end of Rafael Louzán’s career (Ribadumia, 1967) are marked by sport. First, because he started as a janitor in a municipal sports center, something that today allows him to present himself as official. Second, because he has been elected as president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) after the disqualification of Pedro Rocha, fleeting substitute for Luis Rubiales, the man who provoked the #SeAcabó movement with his non-consensual kiss to Jenni Hermoso, what For Louzán it was, at first, “one of those mistakes that are made.”
The trajectory that goes from the pavilion of the Pontevedra town to the Las Rozas Football City is marked by accusations of bossism and foul play, crowned by the conviction for prevarication that in 2021 disqualified him from holding public office for seven years. Louzán and his entourage are convinced that the president of the RFEF is not president, whatever its statutes say. And he is heading there with the same force and the same maneuvers with which he promoted motions of censure in left-wing city councils or tied up the succession of Fraga to Alberto Núñez Feijóo at the expense of who had been his own mentor, the eternal dolphin of the PP. Galician, Xosé Cuíña. Or better yet, one of his mentors. And not the first.
That honor belongs to José Ramón Barral, Babymayor of Ribadumia for 18 years until he was arrested by Customs Surveillance, which considered him one of the main tobacco traffickers in Galicia, right arm of Vicento Otero Terito (yes, the one about “tobacco is for Terito and the old people”, the famous phrase by Sito Miñanco in Farina). Despite spending forty years under the spotlight – from the early 80s until his death in 2023, still with several pending cases – Baby He was never convicted of smuggling, although after his arrest – which he blamed on Aznar’s entourage in Moncloa, where Mariano Rajoy was already present – he was expelled from the PP and set up his own party, Independentes por Ribadumia. Barral threatened many times to talk about Louzán, but he never did.
Many years before his fall from grace, Baby He was the one who gave Louzán the keys to the sports center and, incidentally, access to power. In 98, he was appointed organizational secretary of the PP in Pontevedra and in 2000, president. But beyond the party organs, the authentic power was exercised from the Provincial Council, as José Luis Baltar in Ourense or Francisco Cacharro in Lugo, barons of the rural sector of the beretfaced in the internal struggle with the urbanites of the cap led by Rajoy and Romay Beccaría, who ended up sponsoring Feijóo.
The leader of the berets It was Xosé Cuíña, the true patron of the province of Pontevedra, an all-powerful councilor whom, at that time, everyone saw as Manuel Fraga’s successor. Busy in directing and trying to inherit Galicia, Cuíña needed someone trustworthy for the provincial entity. And there was Louzán, the errand boy, the man for everything who even brought him the folder that accompanied him to see Celta in Balaídos.
“The University of Ribadumia”
Vice president since 1996, in 2003, Louzán took control of the Provincial Council and established his own support network, which was known as the mayors union. He also marked his own style, defined politically by the motions of censure, with or without the collaboration of turncoats – in his farewell to the presidency of the party, in 2016, he still left announcing the last ones – and in relation to management by the proliferation of artificial grass fields throughout the province. Meanwhile, the Provincial Council was filled with faithful workers, coming “from the University of Ribadumia”, as the veteran officials ironically said. Some of those soccer fields awarded by the Provincial Council were built by companies near Louzán.
He mayors union It was key for Núñez Feijóo – driven by the cap of Romay Beccaría – to prevail in succession to Fraga. Of his three rivals, although the later speaker in the Senate Xosé Manuel Barreiro was the one who made it to the end, the one who really worried the future leader of the PP was Cuíña. With Pontevedra as his fortress –Ourense was that of a Baltar who would also end up turning his back on him–, Feijóo needed to mow the grass under his feet and for that he used Louzán.
The president of the Provincial Council turned his back on his origins – as he had done with Barral – and prepared to welcome the new times. He himself called the mayors of the province to threaten them with the withdrawal of support and money from his institution if they did not bet on Alberto. Cuíña had to withdraw even before the congress was held.
Louzán’s practices soon clashed with Justice, although he was able to dodge the first bullets. Like the alleged bribery that would be hidden behind the extra cost that Louzán and his wife charged a popular deputy for some commercial basements in the Vigo neighborhood of Navia. The Superior Court of Xustiza de Galicia (TSXG) annulled all the evidence of the Prosecutor’s Office because it considered that it was due to a “prospective” investigation. The public ministry had no choice but to end up giving up.
By then, due to what could happen in court and detecting a possible political turn in the province – due, above all, to the pull of the socialist Abel Caballero in Vigo – Louzán had sought an alternative plan to the Provincial Council. In 2014 he won the elections for the presidency of the Galician Football Federation. He replaced José García Liñares, historic socialist mayor of Cerceda (A Coruña) who also ended his political life disqualified. He looked like the beta version of Louzán.
The subsidy for a work already completed
Those trademark artificial grass fields ended up being his downfall. In 2021, a Pontevedra court convicted him of fraud and prevarication in the construction of one of them, in the town of Moraña. The sentence considered it proven that the Provincial Council had paid 86,311 euros in 2013 for works to improve the football field that, for the most part, had already been carried out under a previous contract from 2011. Louzán appealed and was exonerated from the conviction for fraud, but not of prevarication or disqualification from holding public office for seven years, a period that expires in 2029, just before the World Cup in which Spain It will be one of the headquarters, and that he will direct if he takes control of the federation.
In 2015, the PP lost the Pontevedra Provincial Council and a year later, Louzán abandoned the provincial presidency of the PP. He was replaced by the current president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, who had been Feijóo’s number two for a decade and who resigned from the general secretary of the PPdeG to try to recover the lost influence in that fiefdom. Rueda maintained the organic position until he inherited the regional government when Feijóo left for Madrid in 2022. A year later, the PP recovered the provincial entity by surprise.
Since his fall, relations between Louzán and the PP leadership have remained distant, at least behind closed doors. Even so, Rueda covered him up after the Rubiales affair, when the president of the Galician Federation, in one of the turns that have marked his career, went from excusing the kiss – “They are mistakes that are made in life” – to present himself as one of the “promoters” of the statement in which the territorial leaders asked him to resign. “We should do little politics with this issue,” the head of the Xunta said then.
Shortly after, an episode took place in which three of the legs of this story were associated: the Galician Federation, the Pontevedra Provincial Council and the women’s team. The world champions received Italy at the city’s stadium, Pasarón, in a Women’s Nations League clash. The fever after the title heralded a full house, and just like that, without empty seats, was how the stands appeared within minutes of the online sale opening. The public’s frustration went viral. Neither the Federation nor the Provincial Council were able to say how many tickets had been made available to the public. The PSOE accused them both of sharing them. Finally, the controversy was attenuated because the Federation had 1,200 more tickets that had been “released” by the Italian fans. The match was held with the expected full house. Spain lost.
Disqualification was not an obstacle
This Thursday, the National Court refused to paralyze the sanction that the Sports Administrative Court (TAD) had imposed on the current president of the RFEF, Pedro Rocha, for “three very serious infractions.” Rocha inherited Rubiales’ position in April when he was abruptly suspended by the International Football Federation (FIFA). He was the only vice president who had not been fired. So, they said that he was not coming to hold on to the position. However, he has been doing everything possible until the last moment to be able to run in the next elections. With this possibility ruled out, there are several territorial barons who now aspire to replace him. And, among them, Louzán is the best placed… despite justice.
The Galician leader, who boasted the support of Javier Tebas, master and lord of La Liga, already served as de facto president at the meal that the leaders had in a restaurant in Torrelodones to develop a strategy if Rocha could not appear, as confirmed just a few hours later. Louzán always defended that his disqualification – appealed before the Supreme Court and pending resolution – does not affect a private entity like the RFEF, despite the fact that it explicitly includes in its statutes, black on white, as a fourth requirement to be part of its bodies “not being disqualified from holding public office.” One of those contradictions that Louzán is getting used to surfing, based on alliances that are woven and unwoven, as long as a judge doesn’t come to throw him off the board. On February 5, the Supreme Court will decide whether to remove him or not.
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