According to "Diario Sport", Barcelona will formally report to the Royal Spanish Football Federation about the controversial ruling in the Copa del Rey away game against Atletico Madrid, and the club is deeply angry at the referee's scale and the semi-automatic offside system errors.
The report said that after suffering a disastrous defeat in the first leg of the Copa del Rey semi-final, Barcelona admitted that the team's performance was not as good as Atletico Madrid, and carried out necessary self-criticism as soon as possible. Flick's team was suppressed throughout the game, especially in the first half, and must learn from all the mistakes made at the Metropolitano Stadium to avoid repeating them. The German coach said at the press conference that this setback in Madrid may be a timely wake-up call.
The team's overall poor performance can coexist with the club's strong questioning of Martinez-Munuera's enforcement standards and the semi-automatic offside technology used to cancel Cubarsi's goal in the early part of the second half. The centre-back pulled a goal back for the team shortly after the start of the second half, but after a seven-minute VAR review, the goal was ruled offside and eventually cancelled.
The Referee Technical Committee of the Spanish Football Association explained that the semi-automatic offside system "made an error in constructing the player's skeletal model when detecting a highly dense area of players", and the VAR team (headed by Gonzalez Fuertes) then manually drew the offside line and finally made and confirmed the correct penalty.
Barcelona is extremely dissatisfied with this penalty decision and will formally submit a written document to the Royal Spanish Football Association in the next few hours. This move will be one of the first major decisions made by Yuste as the new chairman after Laporta resigned to prepare for the March 15 presidential election. The Barcelona club will express its outrage at this penalty to the organization led by Lusan - a penalty that could have helped Flick's team narrow the gap and lay the foundation for a comeback.
What is equally incomprehensible within the Barcelona hierarchy is that Giuliano Simeone only received a yellow card for an extremely fierce tackle on Balde - when the second half had only just begun - and VAR inexplicably did not ask the referee to review it on the sidelines.
In addition, Simone's son should have received a yellow card warning for another stomp on Balde early in the game.