Barcelona, PSG boycott Spanish broadcaster over pundit’s racist Lamine Yamal joke
Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain staged a boycott against Spanish broadcaster Movistar over a racist on-air comment aimed at Lamine Yamal ahead of their Champions League clash on Wednesday.
The Spanish giants ran out 3-2 winners in Paris with an Andreas Christensen header securing victory in a game which caught fire in the second half.
Racism provokes Movistar laughter
But ahead of the game, former Atletico Madrid assistant German Burgos, working as a pundit for Movistar made a comment about 16-year-old wonderkid Lamal that left both Barcelona and PSG furious.
As the Barcelona-born teenager, whose parents are from Morocco and Equitorial Guinea, was shown doing kick-ups on screen in the warm up, one of the pundits said “look at the quality, look at the touches”, to which Burgos replied, “if football doesn’t work out, he’ll end up at a traffic light”.
The comment provoked laughter in the studio before Burgos later apologised on air for his comment.
A terrible apology
Burgos said: “It was a comment made without the intention of hurting anyone. If anyone felt offended I apologise publicly. In these times we have to adapt to everything and that’s what we are in.”
A terrible apology, I think we can all agree.
Players and officials from PSG and Barca were made aware of the comment before the match, and made it known to Movistar that they didn’t wish to speak to them after full-time.
Informing viewers of Barcelona’s decision to boycott all interviews, Movistar presenter Ricardo Sierra said: “I understand that many spectators expected us to have a conversation or interview with Barca.
“But PSG and Barca have notified us that they were not going to attend to us because they were tremendously angry with a comment that was made on our set.”
Having managed to avoid horrendous racist jibes at footballers, TNT Sports spoke to match-winner Christensen after the game.
“Big win, playing away in the Champions League. One game in Barca to go. We played well, we defended well and attacked. Tactically we did really well,” he told TNT Sports.
“They changed a lot of players, we defended [Kylian] Mbappe really well. We create many chances, Raphinha and Robert [Lewandowski] made the difference, Pedri helped us a lot. Very happy and very proud of the team.
“Christensen also with the corner, we did so well. Big win but half work, game in Barca will be tough. PSG one of best teams in world right now.”
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