Jude Bellingham’s controversial sending off in Real Madrid’s 1-1 draw against Osasuna has unleashed utter chaos in Spanish football. The red card was issued by referee Jose Manuel Munuera because he felt Bellingham told him ‘F*** you’. The midfielder insists he said ‘F*** off’ and has video evidence for the same.
This has sparked a debate of whether either of these terms are disrespectful enough for red cards. Over the decades, officials have often been disrespected by players with abusive words but gone unpunished. Well, the pro-Real Madrid media outelts in Spain are definitely incensed with the referee’s actions.
They’ve created a whoel charade over the ‘F*** you’, ‘F*** off’ debate. El Chiringuito TV, a dramatic, over-the-top football show whose host Josep Pedranol has close ties to Florentino Perez, created a whole segment dedicated to this.
The show even brought an English teacher Andy Povedano to the show to describe the difference in meaning between both terms. She explained: “The ‘f*ck you’ is directed directly at a person, whereas the ‘f*ck off’ in this context, especially because it is used a lot in England, is used to say ‘leave me alone’.
“The context, the gestures, the movement are important… He is an English player who has been playing all his life in his mother tongue, where ‘f*ck off’ is used in a very colloquial way between players, friends, relatives..”
That wasn’t the end of this crazy soap opera created around this entire issue. The show El Partidazo on Movistar, an official broadcaster for La Liga in Spain, had four different pundits to debate the entire ‘F*** off, F*** you’ debate after the game.
The referee, Munuera, has predictably attracted a lot of hate online for his actions. Some fans even dug out his Instagram account (where he has over 23,000 followers).
Here they discovered that he actually follows four different English-teaching Instagram accounts to help him learn the language better. Whether he started doing so after or before sending Bellingham off, however, is still unclear.
The term ‘F*** off’ or ‘F*** you’ are terms English referees are probably well accustomed to hearing. However, this strange translation error involving Spanish referee Munuera is probably a lesson for footballers to be careful with the English words they use against non-English speaking referees.
