Javier Tebas: “Our hope is to restart La Liga on June 11th with Sevilla vs Betis”

La Liga CEO Javier Tebas talked to Spanish TV channel #Vamos and confirmed that the Spanish competition will restart on June 11th after the Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sanchez gave the green light to resume their activities starting June 8th.

“There’s a chance we can host a single match on June 11th, we would pay tribute to those who passed away. Our hope is that we can restart La Liga then. We’d like it to be the Sevilla Derby at 22:00 CEST,” said Tebas.

Tebas also explained that he did not know Sanchez was going to authorize the return of La Liga during his speech this past Saturday.

“His announcement caught us a bit by surprise, it proved that professional football is very important in our country. Our main idea now is to work on the first four matchdays during this upcoming week. When we confirm the date for our first game we will also confirm the following four weeks,” said Tebas, confirming that no schedule has been set just yet.

La Liga will play the remainder of its schedule during the summer, which could be problematic because of the hot weather in Spain.

“We have always been concerned about the weather, we’re anticipating that. We are using software to know the temperatures for each day and each city, we use the historic average. That’s how we’re doing the schedule. If there’s a particular hot weather that week the game would be delayed for a few hours. During weekdays, the matches will be played every evening and on weekends there will be three different kick-off times, 17:00 CEST, 19:30 CEST and 21:30 CEST. The games kicking off at 17:00 will be played in the North of our country because the cities there have an average of less than 28ºC. If the temperature is warmer than that, the games will be moved to the next kick-off time,” explained Tebas.

La Liga seems to be doing a good job anticipating the unusual circumstances that could happen after the pandemic and being forced to play into the summer. Spanish football is set to return next June.