Movistar Inter leaves the LNFS
The current champion of the National Indoor Football League has joined the group of rebel teams that have decided to leave the organisation that has covered all First and Second Division indoor football clubs since 1989. After winning 14 league titles in 31 years of competition, the club led by the journalist José María García will put an end to its participation in the best futsal league in the world. The letter is dated July 2, 2020 but it expresses their desire to leave the LNFS from July 1 with the competition already over and having won the play-offs.
Movistar Inter thus bids farewell to a glorious period of more than 30 years of history in which it has reigned in Spain, Europe and the world under the leadership of Jesús Candelas first and Jesús Velasco years later. The sporting crisis for not playing in Europe last season unleashed an economic agony for the Madrid team. Movistar applied severe cuts to all its sports sponsorships, such as basketball and cycling. They have also affected the internal problems that García used to solve with his left hand and now they are a powder keg where two historical figures of the club have left through the back door and the level of the team for next season will be lower.
Ricardinho came to Inter to make the club and the LNFS bigger. His farewell photo will always be that of a player sitting in the stands while his teammates gathered around their coach in the time out. Neither the club nor the Portuguese knew how to wash their dirty laundry at home and they devoted themselves to airing their disagreements in the media. On the other hand, Carlos Ortiz, the team's referee and captain of the Spanish national team, announced his departure and revealed that the club had not offered him a renewal after 12 years of wearing green.
The departure of Movistar Inter from the LNFS joins other clubs such as Peniscola, Jaen and Burela in the First Division as well as Mengibar, Móstoles and Talavera in the Second Division. Curiously, the four clubs in the First Division met with Rubiales a year ago in an Atocha hotel in Madrid to provoke a coup d'état in Spanish indoor football that would make Javier Lozano leave the presidency of the LNFS. Months later and in view of the unity of the other teams, they had to make the decision to leave the LNFS and put their sporting future at risk. They have all submitted similar papers arguing that it is the RFEF that has the capacity to organize the futsal competition. A matter that is already in court. The most controversial part is the TV rights that the LNFS has sold to Mediapro until 2023 with the consent of all clubs, including those that now deny the organisation that achieved the historic milestone of making money out of futsal.
Luis Rubiales' RFEF has declared war on futsal. It has already taken over the organization of the Spanish Cup in Malaga in March and has been the organizer of a play off express that has bordered on administrative and sporting disaster by trying to treat indoor football as a non-professional sport.
Of the 28 teams that make up the LNFS (El Pozo and Barça have subsidiaries in Segunda) the remaining 21 continue to support the management of Javier Lozano at the head of the organization's presidency. More than one club has already expressed the confusion caused by the RFEF trying to manage something for which they do not have resources and that does not provide the media dimension of the LNFS in terms of image and sponsorship.
They fear the clandestinity of a sport in which Spain is a world reference but that now has the challenge of renewing that illusion and those stripes in the World Cup to be held in September 2021 in Lithuania. Inter Movistar breaks the deck of Spanish indoor football with this scare. They put themselves in the hands of an inexperienced federation and are exposed to not competing properly next season if there is no agreement between the parties. The microphone and the pen of the shield of the best futsal club in the world will witness their end.
