Spain’s acting prime minister has added his voice to those criticising the kiss planted on the professional player Jenni Hermoso by the country’s head of football, describing it as “unacceptable”, as the body that oversees sport in Spain was urged to act.
As Spain’s women celebrated their World Cup win over England on Sunday, cameras broadcasting the medal ceremony showed Luis Rubiales, the president of the Spanish football federation, grabbing Hermoso by the head and pulling her towards him for a kiss on the lips.
The gesture, which Hermoso later said she “didn’t like”, swiftly sparked uproar. The acting minister of equality, Irene Montero, called it a “form of sexual violence” while the Netherlands-based players’ union Fifpro described it as “not appropriate or acceptable in any context”.
On Tuesday, the acting prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said Rubiales’s gesture showed that Spain still had a long way to go on equality and women’s rights. “What we saw was an unacceptable gesture,” he told reporters. “And the apologies he has given are not enough, I believe they are not adequate. He needs to continue to take steps to clarify what we all saw.”
Condemnation also came from inside Spain’s football community. “I just thought, how barbaric, how embarrassing,” said Miguel Galán, who leads a national facility that trains football coaches. “We can’t overlook that this took place in a work environment. The federation is the employer and she’s the employee. That reality – along with the element of surprise – means she couldn’t react the way she might have if the context had been different.”
Galán, in his capacity as a national coach with the football federation, lodged an official complaint with the National Sports Council, the government body that oversees sport in Spain.
The complaint, seen by the Guardian, describes the kiss as a “sexist, intolerable act in sport”, and alleges that it violates a Spanish law that bars sexism in sport. It calls on the council to open disciplinary proceedings against Rubiales.
Galán described the kiss as a “sexual aggression”, adding: “It’s a very serious violation.”
The complaint also alleges that the kiss violates the Spanish football federation’s own protocol, which lists a “forced kiss” as one of the behaviours associated with sexual violence. Galán said he had been told by the council that the complaint was being considered.
Neither the council nor Rubiales, contacted through the Spanish football federation, replied to a request for comment from the Guardian.
The complaint, widely reported by Spanish media as the first to be filed over the kiss, is not the first time that Galán has taken aim at the football boss. In 2022, he lodged a complaint with the council over Rubiales’s role in negotiating a lucrative deal to take the Spanish Super Cup to Saudi Arabia.
Scrutiny over Rubiales’s action dominated media reports on Monday, casting a shadow over the achievements of La Roja.
Rubiales’s fumbled response may have helped to increase the attention, as he initially brushed off any suggestion he had acted inappropriately, dismissing those who thought differently as “idiots and stupid people”, before sending out an apology widely interpreted as half-hearted.
“When you are president of an institution as important as the federation, you have to be more careful,” Rubiales said in the video. “We saw it as something natural, normal and not in bad faith, but there are people who have been hurt by this and I have to apologise. There’s no other way, is there?”
The video did little to quell the controversy, which loomed over the raucous welcome given to the team as they brought the trophy home on Monday evening, with an estimated 20,000 people packing the streets of Madrid.
“It’s formidable, you are world champions,” Sánchez, the acting prime minister, said on Tuesday as he met the team. “But you have achieved something else that is so important. And that is that girls that are watching you now see football as a place where they can develop professionally as personally. You are role models.”
What was left unsaid was the longstanding inequality the players have fought against, from inferior salaries to the perception that they are not fully supported by the federation.
By Monday evenin,g Rubiales was back in the headlines, this time over footage shot during the final which appeared to show him grabbing his crotch in a victory gesture.
Soon after, the acting Labour minister and second deputy prime minister, Yolanda Díaz, joined those calling on Rubiales to resign. “He has harassed and, without any doubt, assaulted a woman,” Díaz, who leads the leftwing coalition Sumar, told reporters. “His excuses are of no use at all. We ask that the law that governs sport be complied with and that the federation’s protocols be activated.”
