Long before he became the man who has presided over LALIGA since 2013, Javier Tebas was a nine-year-old walking the streets of Huesca on his own to watch football on a dirt pitch. “You could go even if you were nine years old, just walking there through the streets to watch football,”he recalls.
That boy is the reason we built The Fan Behind…, World Football Summit’s new interview series uncovering the fan hiding behind each of football’s biggest executives. Tebas is our first guest, and the full conversation is now live on WFS’s YouTube channel.
His known support for Real Madrid, as it turns out, was never a plan. It happened by chance, in his grandfather’s living room, not long after the family had come back from living in America. He and his older brother sat down to watch a Clásico in black and white: “We split up randomly, one of us for Barça and the other for Madrid, and that’s when the passion for football took hold.” His brother has stayed a Barça fan ever since. Tebas went the other way.
Even as a boy, he had a taste for running things. In fifth grade he founded his first team with his schoolmates, Bayern Man, and while he was never much of a player, he already knew how to lead: “We were all more or less presidents back then, but there always has to be someone who pulls things along.”
That instinct followed him into adulthood, and years later, as president of SD Huesca, it led him to what he calls the happiest moment of his life in football. After four years falling short in the promotion play-offs, Huesca finally went up: “That was, for me, a moment I will never forget, the most important I have ever lived in football.” He didn’t experience it alone. His eldest son, then seven or eight, came to every home match wearing the shirt: “He’d come and suffer through every match with me.”
That same club still gets under his skin today, only now for the opposite reason. Huesca were relegated to Primera RFEF this year, and Tebas doesn’t hide how much it hurts: “The one that really makes me suffer is SD Huesca, the club from my city, the one I belong to, the one I was president of for many years.” His eldest grandson supports them too, so the suffering, it seems, gets passed down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1j33CWfM9g
A Quirky Story with Cristiano Ronaldo and Georgina
His work as LALIGA President has given him close, personal access to figures he has long admired as a fan, Cristiano Ronaldo among them, who he describes as “much more human than he appears.” One story sticks with him in particular: a chance meeting with Cristiano Ronaldo and Georgina Rodríguez at Riyadh airport, where, in front of the producer of her Netflix series, they discovered that Georgina had once worked as a waitress at a restaurant Tebas used to take his children to. The moment made it into the show. But beyond the anecdote, what stays with him about Ronaldo is “a love for his children that is just as admirable.”
The story of Javier Tebas the fan, the boy sneaking off alone to watch Huesca, the son who never missed a match, the grandson carrying the same colours today, is a perfect example of what World Football Summit calls the essence of football: its ability to generate emotion, to bring people together. That’s the thread our mission is built on, Expanding the Business, Honouring the Essence, so we put the question to him directly: how do you keep growing the business without losing that essence along the way?
He points to remembering how football was experienced 20 or 25 years ago, and rebuilding that sense of belonging deliberately, through campaigns, training and education aimed at fans. And being uncompromising, he adds, on violence in stadiums, because that’s what keeps football something families can still do together.
Tebas will be one of more than 150 speakers taking the stage at WFS Madrid 2026 on 15-16 September at La Nave, in the edition marking World Football Summit’s 10th anniversary, where the next chapter begins.