Five years ago, Luis Rubiales became the twenty-sixth president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF). At the beginning of his term, the sports leader promised to reshape Spanish football, with a special commitment to the professionalization of women’s football, to improve the economic and sporting impact equally. However, those pillars of the legislature have ended up tottering.
An unsolicited kiss to the player Jennifer Hermoso, for which different voices are now asking for her position at an international level. Not so her most intimate circle of hers, who remains by her side, unconditional, supporting her throughout this controversy. These are the members who make up his hard core and who have closed ranks around him.
The controversy is not unknown. His father, Luis Manuel Rubiales, was a psychologist and ran as a candidate for mayor of Motril, Granada, for the Socialist Party. Later, he became the Employment Delegate for the Granada region, on behalf of the Junta de Andalucía. In 2020 he was involved in the ERE matter and the Prosecutor’s Office disqualified him from his public office for eight years and three months.
In the last few hours, however, the one who has gained the greatest prominence has been his mother, Ángeles Béjar, who locked herself up on the morning of Monday, August 28 in the Divina Pastora church in Motril, declaring herself on a hunger strike until the find a solution to the “inhuman and bloody hunt” that, according to her, they are doing with her son “with something he does not deserve.”
The woman, who remains inside with her sister and Luis Rubiales’ aunt, insists that this confinement and strike will last “indefinitely, day and night”, until justice is done.
The suspended leader is the father of three daughters: Lucía, Ana and Elena; born as a result of his relationship with the lawyer Manuela Delicado. The three were present at the controversial press conference offered by Rubiales on Friday, August 25, in which he made it clear that he was not planning to resign. Little was known about them until the former soccer player appeared last March on Traveling with Chester, where he revealed more information about his private and family life.
“I am in love with them like all the parents in the world,” Rubiales assured Risto Mejide, presenter of the program, “My daughters are very strong, stronger than me. I consider myself a strong uncle, but my daughters are not normal”. Of the three, some information is known, provided in space by his father.
“The eldest is studying Art History, she is a very sensitive aunt and with a commitment to herself and to society. The middle one is the one who most resembles me, perhaps the most vindictive and is, in addition, an aunt with a bestial intelligence “he said, adding that the little girl, a soccer player like him, “is the one who had the most special way of saying ‘I love you’: in the midst of the controversy with the press, she put my name and number on her back”.
With his ex-wife, Manuela Delicado, he maintains a good relationship, despite the fact that their separation and subsequent divorce was at least complicated. However, doing the best for his three daughters has kept them together. “We were very happy, but when you go to another stage, well, you go,” explained Rubiales, “My ex-wife has done a good job.”
His cousin, Vanesa Ruiz Béjar, is the last of the members of the Rubiales family who has shown his face before the press. A firm defender of the temporarily disabled president, she has only been able to show her outrage at what is happening to her cousin. “For me these statements are very harsh. To say that there is harassment and demolition that is not fair,” she declared before the press.
“What is happening does not seem fair to us. That he has been judged prematurely,” he continued, with only one request to the player: “We want Jenni to tell the truth and for justice to be done.”
