Atletico Madrid have hit back at Jose Mourinho after the Real Madrid boss arrived at his post-Madrid derby news conference on Sunday carrying printouts of screenshots displaying two incidents he believed should have resulted in red cards for Atletico.
Mourinho accused the officials of making key errors after Real were beaten 2-1 by Atletico, claiming the hosts should have been handed two red cards in the first half.
On Monday, Atletico posted twice on their X account, the first being a video showing a sheet of paper coming out of a printer with the words #StopAcosoArbitralYA, meaning “stop referee harassment now”.
A second post showed a picture of Mourinho at the news conference with the same message.
The response from Atletico received two million views on X within two hours of it being posted.
Diego Simeone’s team often use their social media accounts to respond to their rivals, repeatedly posting on X this summer to ridicule Barcelona over their pursuit of Atletico’s talisman Julian Alvarez.
Alongside Mourinho’s post-match claims, the match report published on Real’s website said that the derby loss was decided because of “dreadful refereeing” of Ortiz Arias.
It was Real’s second defeat of the season, having lost 1-0 to Real Betis earlier in September.
“We can skip the press conference because the story of the match is right here,” Mourinho said as he showed media the printed images on sheets of A4 paper on Sunday.
“Those were two clear red cards. Given the difficulties we faced afterwards playing 11 against 10, we can only imagine what 50 minutes of 11 against nine would have been like.
“So I’ll just have to limit myself to hugging my players, who gave it their all and played a first half, showed great class and character, setting us up perfectly to win the second half.”
Simeone, when asked to respond to Mourinho’s refereeing rant, said he was always respectful of everyone else’s opinions.
“I understand that we’re in a privileged position with a lot of public scrutiny, as coaches, and whether it’s Mourinho, [Barcelona manager Hansi] Flick, [Real Betis boss Manuel] Pellegrini, me, or anyone else, we need to be careful about what we say,” he said.
“We have to know how to respect others, the referees, our colleagues. And when someone crosses that line of respect, it’s not right - you can’t cross that line.”