The former Spanish Football Federation president Luis Rubiales returns to the global public eye this week as he goes on trial for alleged sexual assault and coercion of Spain forward Jenni Hermoso after the 2023 Women’s World Cup final.

Rubiales kissing Hermoso during the medal ceremony in Sydney nearly 18 months ago overshadowed Spain’s achievement of winning their first major trophy, despite not always receiving the backing and support they deserved from the national team setup.

Prosecutors from Spain’s Audiencia Nacional (high court) maintain the kiss was not consensual and that Rubiales and three others — Albert Luque, Jorge Vilda and Ruben Rivera —then tried to force Hermoso to say the opposite. The prosecutors are asking for a two-and-a-half-year sentence for Rubiales and 18-month sentences for the others. All four have denied any wrongdoing.

International outrage at Rubiales’ behaviour after the final led directly to the end of his controversial five-year presidency, but his shadow lingers over Spanish football, and anti-corruption authorities are still investigating various business deals from his time running the federation.

Before this trial starts in Madrid, The Athletic has built a portrait of a figure whose rise through Spanish football remains much less well-known than the events that led to his downfall.

Although Rubiales was born in Las Palmas in August 1977, he grew up in Motril, located on Spain’s southern coast, an hour’s drive south of Granada and an hour’s drive east of Malaga. Even before he reached global notoriety for his behaviour in Sydney, he was the most famous son of this town of around 60,000 inhabitants.

At 14, Rubiales made his senior debut in the Andalusian regional league with Club de Futbol Motril, before joining the youth ranks of La Liga club Valencia. He did not quite make it at Mestalla, but never shirked a challenge as a tough defender for Spanish clubs including Levante and Xerez, before finishing his career with three Scottish Premier League appearances at Hamilton Academical in the autumn of 2009.

(Alan HarveySNS Group via Getty Images)

Within six months, Rubiales had become president of Spain’s players union (AFE) by outmanoeuvring its previous chief of 22 years, Gerardo Gonzalez Movilla. He then quickly set about taking on La Liga’s president, Javier Tebas, organising a players’ strike that delayed the start of the 2011-12 season.

“Rubiales is a guy who needs to be the centre of attention,” says a source who worked with him back then but declined to be named for this story, as did many others, to protect relationships.

The next step was the Spanish Football Federation (RFEF). In 2017, Rubiales helped mount the motion of censure that ended his former ally Angel Maria Villar’s 29-year reign as RFEF chief. Having already courted support among the power-brokering barons at Spain’s regional football federations, Rubiales easily won the election to fill the vacancy.

Rubiales’ first official day as the RFEF’s president in May 2018 was a harbinger of what was to come. He spent the morning giving a deposition in a Valencia court, then travelled 300km on the high-speed train to Madrid for his confirmation, which was attended by his parents and his three daughters (but not their mother as the couple had by then separated).

Among his first acts as president was dismissing Julen Lopetegui on the eve of the 2018 World Cup after the head coach of the men’s national team had agreed to manage Real Madrid once the tournament was over. Although that torpedoed Spain’s chances of success in the tournament, Rubiales remained 100 per cent sure he had made the right decision. “(Former United States president) Barack Obama told me that there are times when you just have to act,” he revealed after returning from Russia.

At the AFE and the RFEF, Rubiales often hired people he already knew and trusted. His uncle Juan, a former journalist, ran his campaign to be federation president and was then appointed his chief of staff.  His former Levante team-mate Felix Ettien was hired as the federation’s official driver. Two long-term associates from Granada were also given jobs — Francis Hernandez to manage the federation’s youth setup and Jose Maria ‘Mora’ Gordillo to run the sporting facilities at its HQ in Las Rozas near Madrid.

Ruben Rivera, who had been marketing director at the AFE, followed Rubiales and took on the same position at the federation. Former Spain player Luque was an informal adviser to Rubiales, before being appointed the federation’s sporting director in January 2023. Rivera and Luque are also on trial in Madrid — for coercion in allegedly trying to persuade Hermoso to publicly say she had consented to the kiss after the World Cup final in Sydney.

Luque, Rubiales and the Spain men’s head coach Luis de la Fuente (Steve Welsh/PA Images via Getty Images)

Under Rubiales, everyone at the federation’s Las Rozas base knew who was in charge. Decision-making was often very centralised and the president made the important decisions.

“On the pitch, he was always intense, always strong,” says a former RFEF employee. “And his management of the federation has been the same. He’s a very extroverted guy, with a very authoritarian way of acting.”

Attempts to change lower-level football in Spain (a federation remit) brought Rubiales into conflict with many smaller clubs who did not agree with his reforms. There were also regular battles with Tebas and La Liga for control of different areas of Spanish football, leading to regular court-battle between the two organisations. Rubiales won some and lost some of those cases.

The Andalusian lobbied the Spanish government hard — text messages leaked to the local media appeared to show him pressuring Spanish president Pedro Sanchez to take his side against La Liga’s president. A federation spokesperson went on Tele 5 the next day and described the reports as “lies”. After more leaks of audio recordings of conversations between Rubiales and politicians, the former sports minister Irene Lozano told reporters: “I always suspected I was being spied upon.” 

In an interview with El Partidazo de COPE, when asked if he recorded Spanish politicians, Rubiales replied: “That’s false. I did not record any conversation.” He then expanded his answers to say that others were responsible for the act of recording conversations and that they had since left the RFEF.

During his presidency, Rubiales appointed some women to senior roles at the federation, but many left and some have complained about the sexist culture there, as detailed by former player and youth coach Tona Is in an interview with The Athletic.

Women’s football has never received enough resources or attention in Spain — the 2023 tournament was only the third Women’s World Cup they had qualified for — and Rubiales did not change a long-running culture of sexism within its hierarchy and workings. Fifteen players resigned from the Spain squad in 2022, protesting unequal treatment including a lack of resources and what they viewed as intrusions into their private lives.

Rubiales’ inappropriate behaviour after the World Cup victory was not limited to kissing Hermoso. He lifted five players off their feet during the medal ceremony, carried forward Athenea del Castillo over his shoulder and kissed goalscorer Olga Carmona on the cheek. A FIFA report also found he had unwanted physical contact with two English players on the pitch after the game.

Rubiales hiring his uncle at the federation did not end well. Juan left the federation in August 2020 and has since become a very vocal critic of his nephew. He has also testified in an investigation by Spain’s anti-corruption authorities into potential financial crimes at the federation during Rubiales’ presidency.

That Operacion Brodie investigation began by looking into the deal brokered by former Barcelona and Spain defender Gerard Pique’s company Kosmos to play the Supercopa de Espana (Spain’s equivalent to the Community Shield in English football) in Saudi Arabia.

(Marc Atkins/Getty Images)

It has since been broadened to look at other issues, including construction work carried out by a company that investigators believe was linked to Rubiales and associates at the Estadio de La Cartuja in Seville.

“In the end, it will be shown that I have never misused federation money, never accepted anything that was not mine,” Rubiales said in 2023. Pique is not accused of anything and has denied any wrongdoing.

The most salacious allegation that has come out of the Operacion Brodie investigation was the use of RFEF money to hire a chalet in Salobrena, a coastal village near Motril. What was officially called a work event was actually, Juan Rubiales reportedly told El Confidencial, a party for Rubiales and his closest associates, to which young women were also invited.

After judicial investigators started looking at this event, the costs were reportedly repaid to the federation coffers by those who attended. Rubiales showed customary chutzpah when telling El Pais that it had been a “work event” that also featured “some leisure time with a barbecue with friends — men and women. It seems now you cannot have people of different genders having a drink and a paella together, which is what we did”.

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Rubiales’ reaction to any leak or allegation of wrongdoing was always to vehemently deny any wrongdoing and blame external enemies he claims are engaged in conspiracies to bring him down.

In April 2022, he called a press conference to respond to a story in El Confidencial alleging that Pique’s company Kosmos received €24million (£20m; $25m at current rates) from the 2019 agreement for the Supercopa to move to Saudi Arabia.

“This is like a mafia operation, to damage my image,” Rubiales said that day. “I’m just a normal guy from Motril. I go out with my friends, but I don’t drink alcohol, don’t smoke. I can’t guarantee that tomorrow morning someone won’t plant a bag of cocaine in my car, but I’m sure that I’m the good guy in all of this.”

Pique soon admitted that Kosmos did indeed receive what he said was a “typical percentage” for their role in organising the arrangement with the Saudis, while adding: “People can doubt whether it was correct, or if there was a conflict of interest, but what is illegal is taking private audio messages and leaking them in an interested way.”

Rubiales’ initial reaction to being told that his kiss on Hermoso was being described as sexual abuse also showed his way of dealing with criticism. In a radio interview with Cadena Cope the same night, he described his critics as “dickheads” and “losers”.

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When this approach did not work, Rubiales changed tack to trying to convince Hermoso to say publicly that the kiss had been consensual. Prosecutors in the current trial maintain that his efforts — and those of Vilda, Luque and Rivera — went so far as to be the crime of coercion. 

Jorge Vilda, the former head coach of Spain’s women’s team, in 2023 (Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images)

Through those days, Rubiales tried everything he could to hang onto power, even as many public figures including Spain’s president Sanchez were calling on him to step down, and FIFA had opened a disciplinary investigation into his behaviour. 

For his now infamous speech where he shouted “I will not resign” five times, female federation staff were obliged to be in the front row for what they believed would be his resignation speech. During that same speech, Rubiales repeated that the kiss had been a consensual “little peck”, took aim at “false feminists”, and said he was the victim of a long-running campaign of “social assassination”.

When Hermoso responded by denying the kiss was consensual and mentioning the “manipulative culture” that Rubiales had generated at Las Rozas, the federation released another statement threatening Hermoso with legal action for the “lies” it said she was spreading. 

The following day yet another statement was released, doubling down on the accusation that Hermoso had lied and claiming she had been “abducted” by her union FUTPro and other interested parties who wanted Rubiales removed from his post. That second statement was taken down within hours.

During what must have been the most stressful period of his professional career, in the glare of the world’s media, Rubiales showed the same instinct to lash out and see enemies conspiring against him and trying to bring him down.

Among those in the audience for Rubiales’ “I will not resign” speech was his father, Luis Manuel.

“Papa, we are going to get through this,” Rubiales said from the podium. “I’ve been able to do many things in my life thanks to parents who have taught me everything and made me who I am today.”

Luis Rubiales senior was born in Motril in 1953. A primary school teacher who had studied psychology, he was known as a strong disciplinarian. “It was another era,” one former student told El Espanol when asked if physical punishment occurred in the classroom.

In 1987, Rubiales senior was elected to the city council representing the PSOE (the Spanish socialist workers’ party). By 1995, he was mayor, serving until 2003, when political links brought him a post within the Andalusian regional government, also led by the PSOE.

He later returned to Motril to try to become mayor again but fell out with PSOE colleagues. Following a failed attempt to start his own political party, he retired from public life until a police investigation implicated him in the alleged misuse of public funds during his regional government role. In 2016, he said in court that he knew nothing about the payments under scrutiny.

In February 2020, prosecutors in Seville asked for him and eight co-accused to be given prison sentences of three years. Nearly five years later, the case has yet to be concluded.

The family’s status in Motril was nevertheless further formalised when the new RFEF president was awarded the city’s gold medal of honour in June 2021. Rubiales senior was by now a regular presence around the federation’s HQ. “Rubiales (junior) never does anything without consulting with his father,” a former RFEF employee told The Athletic. 

Rubiales’ parents are long separated and his mother Dolores Bejar was not well-known publicly. That was until, two days after FIFA suspended her son, Bejar dramatically inserted herself into her son’s public story. She went on a hunger strike inside Motril’s Church of the Divine Shepherdess, saying she would not come out until Hermoso “told the truth”, which, in her mind, meant agreeing with her son’s version of events following the World Cup final.

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Outside the church, friends of the family protested in support of Rubiales, with one telling The Athletic he had suffered an “injustice”. The drama ended after three days when Bejar was removed to a local hospital, from where she was discharged home.

Views of Rubiales in his hometown remained mixed. A PSOE member of Motril’s town council told The Athletic while Bejar was still inside the church that he should be stripped of the town’s medal of honour, but the following month a majority on the council voted not to revoke the honour until investigations around the Hermoso kiss were concluded.

When Rubiales realised his time at the federation was over due to FIFA’s suspension, a week after the events in Sydney, he characteristically went on the attack again. 

He chose to announce his resignation from the RFEF in a September 2023 interview on British channel TalkTV with Piers Morgan, while again portraying himself as the victim of “lies” from Hermoso, in a conspiracy orchestrated by other unnamed enemies. 

He also boasted in that interview of having raised the federation’s annual revenues from €3million to €27million, without addressing the fact that Spanish anti-corruption investigators were looking closely at the deal taking the Supercopa to Saudi, which was the main reason the revenue increased so much.

Before leaving, Rubiales had managed to handpick a successor, his former vice-president and the Extremaduran regional chief Pedro Rocha. Rocha quickly took over the €675,761 annual salary and decision-making power.

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Although the Spanish government spoke loudly about the need for reform at Las Rozas, it was collective action by Hermoso and her national team-mates in late September 2024 that led to Rocha firing some of Rubiales’ closest associates, including general secretary Andreu Camps. 

In December, Rubiales did another interview with Luis ‘Alvise’ Perez, a far-right Spanish internet personality, claiming that Spain’s socialist government had made a big deal of him kissing Hermoso to distract people from their ‘amnesty’ deal with Catalan separatist politicians. 

There was still no sign of him taking responsibility for his actions. For him, outrage should be directed at everyone else — Hermoso, Tebas, feminist critics, even the president of the Spanish government.

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His sense of having enemies everywhere was a constant during Rubiales’ tenures at AFE and the RFEF. From spying scandals, recording of conversations, or suggesting that someone would plant cocaine in his car, up to the claims that Hermoso had deliberately changed her story as part of a conspiracy to bring him down.

“He is a cowardly man — arrogant, overbearing, obsessed with power and money, but insecure at the same time,” Juan Rubiales told El Confidencial about his nephew in August 2023. “He used the federation to fight against these ghosts he sees everywhere. But his greatest enemy is himself.”

Luis Rubiales has, for his part, accused his uncle of betrayal and deliberately setting him up for a fall by recording and leaking phone conversations, including those with Spanish politicians. Juan Rubiales said there are court rulings which say he had nothing to do with them. Both Rubiales’ uncle and mother have kept a low profile since the events of August 2023.

Since being forced out of all his roles in football, Rubiales has become involved in new business activities. In January 2024, he launched an NFT with South Korean company Moon Labs. The publicity material invited those who believed Rubiales was not guilty of sexual assault and who were against “extremism and radical feminism” to buy the cryptocurrency tokens. Very few actually sold and its price also immediately plummeted.

Este mensaje es para quienes respaldan la igualdad real y no radicalismos ni manipulaciones mediáticas.

This message is for those who support real equality and not radicalism or media manipulations.

⚖️🏆

LINK NFTs 17/1/2024:https://t.co/PoGaDKakrZ pic.twitter.com/KVfINtr6X6

— Luis Rubiales (@LuisRubiales17) January 16, 2024

A couple of months later, in March 2024, Rubiales was again making headlines when his property in Granada was raided as part of Operacion Brodie. The anti-corruption investigation is also examining projects in Saudi Arabia and China in which Rubiales was potentially involved as federation president. He denies any wrongdoing.

Rubiales had by now set up another base in the Dominican Republic, which Spanish officers also searched in March. Ordered by the investigating judge, Delia Rodrigo, to return to Spain, he was immediately detained and questioned at Madrid’s Barajas airport. He invoked his right not to testify and was released, but did tell Spanish TV station La Sexta that week that he had investments in the Caribbean country and was upset his bank accounts there had been frozen.

“All the money I’ve transferred from Spain to the Dominican Republic is legal,” he said. “I’ve never taken a ‘mordida’ (a ‘bite’, illegal commission).”

“I’ve suffered such a media beating that I cannot work in Spain, from football or anything else,” Rubiales also said during that interview. 

Operacion Brodie investigators are continuing to look into Rubiales’ activities, but no charges have been brought against him or any associates.

More immediately, Rubiales is going on trial in Madrid accused of sexual assault and coercion of Hermoso. He is due in court next week (February 12) to testify, and all the evidence suggests he will again vehemently defend himself and refuse to accept any wrongdoing.

(Note: A version of this piece was published in August 2023. It has been comprehensively updated to reflect the 18 months since and the upcoming trial in Madrid)

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)