It is well known that in football there are moments of tension both on the field and in the stands. Even recurring, although not justified. Also in base football matches, unfortunately. In many cases, fortunately, these frictions do not tend to escalate. Although there are exceptions (more than we would like).
One of these happened on January 27 in a group 27 match of the second Catalan youth division between Club Barcelonista Terlenka (El Prat de Llobregat) and Sagrat Cor de Sarrià (Barcelona). Once the 90 minutes were over, the 16-year-old rival goalkeeper was attacked by a dozen people (some from the stands) which could have ended in tragedy. Lying on the ground, the young man was kicked numerous times (including in the head) resulting in bruises and a fractured thumb on his right hand. Obviously, the parents filed a complaint with the Mossos d’Esquadra.
The incident began to take shape in the final minutes of the game, when the Sacred Heart scored the winning goal and L.F. – according to the version of his mother, Patrícia – he celebrated by closing his fist and looking at his colleagues. “At that moment I heard someone yelling at her: ‘Stop celebrating or I’ll break your legs!'” explains Patrícia. Obviously, hearing this sentence addressed to his son was not pleasant, but he thought it would not go beyond a threat. He was wrong.
After the final whistle, and according to his testimony, a person “over 18 years old went towards the position of his son, who was greeting rival players, and hit him from behind at the height of the knees and brought him down. Once on the ground, this individual, accompanied by others who also jumped from the stands and several players from the rival team”, he points out, began to kick him.
“They started kicking me, I didn’t understand what was happening”, explains L.F. himself. in La Vanguardia. His mind has erased part of what happened: from the first moments of the aggression until it ended. “The first time I tried to open my eyes while they were beating me I had no vision, it was all black. When I tried to open them again later I could already see: there were my parents and the coach”.
Patrícia lived the entire scene from the stands in fear. “They’ve thrown L. to the ground!, They’ve thrown L. to the ground!”, she shouted several times to her husband, who immediately jumped onto the field with other parents from the team to go to his son’s aid. “When my husband reached L.’s height – he continues – he was shaking, he couldn’t breathe and he had lost his vision”. After a few seconds she arrived. “He told me he was dizzy. I began to touch his head in search of blood and found none, but I did notice four lumps: on one side of his head, on the back of his head… He also complained of pain in his hand and all over body I was worried about the boss”.
Fortunately, as the minutes passed the young man began to feel a little better. The parents moved him to the visiting locker room, where his teammates were.
Minutes later, officers from the Mossos d’Esquadra arrived, who advised the family to file a complaint, after visiting the doctor. And this is what the parents did after they visited their son at Sant Joan de Déu hospital in Barcelona. In addition to the bruises and hematomas, the young man has a fractured thumb on his right hand.
His mother is thankful that the attack didn’t last more than 30 seconds. “If in that short space of time they broke a finger and caused four bruises on his head, imagine what could have happened in a minute”, he says. “He thinks that some of the attackers were players from the other club and were wearing football boots”, he adds.
She defends that it was several footballers from the local team, and not just one, who assaulted her son, although the arbitration report only mentions L.P., also 16 years old. “I imagine that the referee was only given time to identify one”, argues the mother of the victim, who asserts that, in total, “between eight and ten people” took part in the assault.
Sources from the Mossos d’Esquadra have confirmed to this newspaper that in addition to the player identified in the report, some “eight or ten other people, aged between 16 and 20, took part in the attack” and that the investigation remains open to identify them.
At Terlenka (as the Prat de Llobregat club is popularly known) they emphasize that they are collaborating with the Mossos to identify the aggressors. Its vice-president, José Francisco Sandoval, who experienced the events live, explains that from his position, about 50 meters from the point of aggression, he saw a person coming from the stands hitting the rival goalkeeper, who he fell to the ground and one of his players – “I only saw one”, he points out – kicked him several times.
He states that situations like this are “inadmissible”, that “obviously the club is against any type of violence” and that it will be the Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office who will determine what punishment their player deserves. At the moment, the Catalan Football Federation has sanctioned him with eight games of suspension, and the club, with three behind closed doors. Terlenka has appealed the sanction to the organization (an appeal that has been denied), but not the player.
Sandoval reports that on the Monday following the events, they sent an email – this newspaper has seen it – to the Sagrad Cor de Sarrià in which they apologized for what had happened and asked for the condition of the assaulted player. He assures that they have given the police the recordings of the cameras distributed around the site and that they record the accesses and all the files of their players, from cadets to amateurs. In addition, and as a result of the conversations they have had with footballers from the club, they believe they have been able to identify two people – “one is a player from another of our teams who jumped onto the field from the stands, and the second, a soccer player from another club” – who could have participated in the attack, information that they have made known to the Mossos.
