AFE will sue LaLiga for its “refusal to constitute” the Negotiating Table of the Collective Agreement

The Association of Spanish Footballers (AFE) will sue LaLiga for its “refusal to constitute” the negotiating table for the First and Second Division Collective Agreement, after an agreement was not reached this Monday in the mediation event held at the Interconfederal Mediation and Arbitration Service (SIMA), and defended that the employers “despise democracy” and “the mandate of the footballers.”

“AFE will file a collective dispute lawsuit due to LaLiga’s refusal to establish the negotiating committee for the First and Second Division Collective Agreement,” the union announced in a statement issued this Monday.

The entity chaired by David Aganzo adopts this decision because “LaLiga does not want to comply with the provisions of provision 17 of the Sports Law”, which says that in the collective agreements aimed at professional athletes, “union organizations constituted in each sports modality or specialty that have been designated by the majority of their representatives through personal, free, direct and secret voting will be legitimized to negotiate.”

On Friday, June 12, LaLiga convened the AFE and Futbolistas ON unions “in light of the discrepancies” that arose between both unions and in order to be able to establish the Negotiating Table for the new agreement as soon as possible. Since there was no agreement, they went to SIMA, where it was not achieved either.

A controversy that comes as a result of the last elections to find out which union would be chosen to represent the footballers in this negotiation, a process that AFE won overwhelmingly with 93.14 percent of the votes, compared to 6.2 percent of Futbolistas ON.

The law says that this representation must be for the unions a minimum of 10 percent of the total valid votes cast in the elections to designate the workers’ representative commission. Thus, AFE sees itself as “the only union legitimized to negotiate the Collective Agreement after the footballers of the 42 First and Second Division locker rooms vote.”

For this reason, AFE criticizes that LaLiga “despises democracy, the mandate of the footballers, with the sole objective of including in the negotiations a union that is not legitimized to do so as it has not been supported with the votes of the footballers.”

“Javier Tebas, with this procedure, refuses to comply with the provisions of the Law and is harming the footballers, as important improvements to practice their profession cannot be negotiated for the new Collective Agreement,” added the forceful statement from the union chaired by David Aganzo.

From Futbolistas ON, with the support of LaLiga, according to the AFE, they hide behind an approach to the process carried out in 2019 and in which the National Court established a protocol by which any union that wanted to sit at the negotiating table had to have at least 5 percent.

Furthermore, the AFE already assured a few days ago that it was referring to a letter that LaLiga sent them at the end of last January, after the union denounced the Collective Agreement in December 2025, in which the employers’ association pointed out in its second point that in order to have a “correct” formation of the Negotiating Table, the provisions of the Sports Law had to be respected.