Barcelona's Controversial Penalty Against Levante: When a Former Referee Says the Word 'Wrong'

In the 46th minute, the very moment the second half kicked off, the Round 5 La Liga fixture between Barcelona and Levante turned in a direction no one in the stands could have predicted. The score was 2-0 to the hosts. The first-half goals had been scored by Xavi Espart and Lamine Yamal. Then, in a passage of play that most viewers only caught as a fleeting shoulder contact on screen, referee Gonzalez Esteban pointed to the spot. Yamal stepped up, placed the ball, and scored. Three seconds later, the score could have been 3-0. But it would take several more hours, as the late-night Madrid talk shows began to air, before the real story of the match was put on the operating table. Not about the goal, but about the decisive moment. There, on Cadena SER and later quoted by AS and Goal.com, a man named Iturralde Gonzalez, a former FIFA referee who once officiated in La Liga and is now a regular analyst on Spanish sports programmes, said something the country's football media is not used to hearing from a former colleague: that penalty was wrong. He explained further: the attacker 'kicked the ball from below', meaning he initiated the contact himself, actively placing his leg into the defender's trajectory rather than being fouled by the defender. In a Spanish football context where every refereeing decision is placed at the centre of the pressure scale, this is not an ordinary opinion. It is a technical, verifiable, and contestable statement.