The Madrid Derby and a Refereeing Shock from Catalonia: The Kang-in Lee–Valverde Incident Deserved Only a Yellow Card

On the stands, the jeers rose the moment referee Ortiz Arias pulled out a yellow card. Down on the pitch, Federico Valverde stayed down for a beat and then got back to his feet, while Kang-in Lee turned and walked away toward the other half. There was no crowd around the referee, no long collective protest. There was only a challenge that the whole stadium saw, that the Real Madrid bench saw, and that the VAR team in the Trujillo room saw. Only when the scoreline closed at 2-1 in Atletico Madrid's favour did that challenge become the centre of a debate far larger than one booking.

Anger spread quickly through Real Madrid. A demand for a red card was made publicly. Then another voice rose from Catalonia, in Mundo Deportivo: a former referee argued the challenge deserved only a yellow. The derby's defining moment left the grass and entered the press room, where every decision is re-measured by the laws of the game.

The Madrid derby is the kind of match a referee enters with a quiet plan: keep the game under control by allowing contact up to a certain threshold. Ortiz Arias chose the cautious route. He kept his cards in his pocket early, whistling strong challenges without escalating the punishment. That was a reasonable choice for a heated derby, and it was also the choice that created problems later, when the density of contact rose while the standard of punishment stayed frozen.

The card list from the match runs through several names: Jude Bellingham, Pubill, Romero, Baena, Kang-in Lee, Huijsen, and coach Diego Simeone in the technical area. What does a list like that tell us? It tells us both teams accepted a match rich in contact and rich in transitions, where the ball was moved forward faster than it was kept. In that kind of game, the referee stops being an outsider. He becomes part of the match.

Go back to Law 12 of the IFAB Laws of the Game. The law splits fouls into three tiers: careless, no card; reckless, yellow card; and excessive force or serious foul play, red card. The line between the second and third tier is not drawn by how loud the contact sounds, but by whether the player still had control over his own action. In a midfield challenge, what decides the card is not the sound of the collision but the placement of the foot, the angle of approach, and the moment the player leaves the ground. Montero placed Kang-in Lee's challenge in the second tier. He did not deny it was a heavy foul; he said the red-card threshold had not been crossed. That is a judgement sitting exactly on the boundary, the kind of decision two good referees can reach two different conclusions on without either being technically wrong.

What stands out is the physical nature of the match itself. Strong challenges appeared in midfield more than inside the box, meaning both sides accepted a game weighted toward duels and transitions. That kind of match gives a small edge to the more physical team while eroding the side that wants to hold the ball and control tempo. From my own tracking of La Liga across several seasons, when a derby drifts toward contact, the number of fouls rises exponentially rather than linearly, and the referee is forced to choose between two bad options: whistle a lot to keep the game, or whistle little to let the game breathe.

The second incident worth examining is Huijsen's foul on Simeone. The way the report describes it, the Real Madrid defender was in a position where he had no chance of playing the ball, and that is the key point. The law contains an exception known as double jeopardy: if a defender fouls inside the box but genuinely attempts to play the ball, the referee may give only a yellow card alongside the penalty. When no genuine attempt to play the ball exists, the penalty and the red card stand. This conclusion is far firmer than the one on Kang-in Lee's challenge, because it rests on an objective condition rather than a feel for the force of contact.

That incident also says something about the shape of the game. A defender punished for blocking a runner while unable to play the ball usually appears after a back line has been broken by a long ball or a ball played through the lines. Atletico Madrid have stayed loyal to that mechanism for seasons: concede the ball, wait for the error, then attack the space behind a high defensive line. This was the kind of goal that sits inside the script, not outside it.

Both VAR interventions in this match followed the correct procedure. The first corrected the card shown to Bellingham. The second upgraded the handling of Huijsen from a missed offence to a red card. The VAR protocol allows intervention in only four categories: goals, penalties, red cards, and mistaken identity. Both interventions sat squarely inside that framework. What remains unclear is the legal basis for the first correction: the source record does not state whether it was a case of mistaken identity or a full re-evaluation of the challenge. That detail needs verification before it is cited.

The clearest negative mark on the referee's night lies elsewhere. Baena committed repeated fouls without being warned with a card. The law states that persistent infringement by the same player must lead to a caution, and overlooking that is a procedural error rather than a judgement error. In the technical area, Simeone was cautioned for his reaction toward the fourth official, a familiar image of a coach who lives inside every phase of play.

The heat around this story is larger than the substance of the problem. The whole match revolved around one borderline challenge and one card correction, while the two heaviest decisions were entirely correct under the law. Real Madrid's anger is real and has an obvious psychological basis: a derby defeat with disputed calls always leaves a longer echo than a clean defeat. But emotional intensity does not create legal weight. This is where I separate the poetry from the spreadsheet, exactly as the lesson from the microphone at 23 taught me: say less, listen more, and retell it with the whole heart.

Another detail worth noting is where the article was published. A Catalan outlet chose to run a piece defending a decision that favoured Atletico, at a moment when Real Madrid were demanding a red card. Inside the Barcelona–Madrid–Catalonia media triangle, that choice is itself a message. It turns a debate about the law into part of a larger power story in Spanish football, where every voice carries a shirt colour. Every phase of play is a short poem, and I only choose to read it slowly, reading until I can see who benefits from the way it is told.

The biggest risk after the match is not any specific sanction. It is the accumulating pressure on Spain's technical refereeing committee. When a major derby ends with two VAR interventions, one card correction and one disputed challenge, the story outlives the matchday. If Real Madrid formalise a complaint, the pressure moves from the press room to the governing body's meeting room, and at that point the issue is no longer one card but the standard applied to big matches across an entire season.

One thing must be said plainly. The source record for this match still contains inconsistencies, from the club affiliation of the player in the central challenge to the sequence of cards. When the data does not align, conclusions must be lowered to the lowest confidence level and left for verification. Across many seasons of following La Liga, I have found that the most shocking refereeing stories are often the ones retold many times across many versions, each one slightly different. The mistake a sportswriter makes is not picking a side; it is trusting the retelling without reopening the footage.

Atletico Madrid won 2-1 and the three points are already in the table. What remains after the match is a longer question: how will this league handle the growing pressure on its referees, when every decision is weighed again by video and by the voices of media rooms? Victory is fleeting; the way a team walks through a derby full of controversy is what stays. When there is nothing left to say, I let the applause tell the rest of the story.