Swinging your arm backwards into an opponent because he's got a fistful of your shirt is a foul. It should have been a yellow card at the very least, and Arda Güler walked away with nothing. Anyone online calling this a man gently brushing off a hand is kidding themselves.
Here's what happened on Sunday, October 18, at the Bernabéu, with Real Madrid and Sevilla level at 0-0 in the first half of a La Liga match Madrid went on to win 4-1. Madrid broke forward. Güler, off the ball, got held back by Peque Fernández, Sevilla's number 10. Peque pulled his shirt. Güler swung an elbow and sent him to the floor. Nobody disputes that sequence. The shirt-pull came first, the arm came second.
The loudest defence going around is that this was just a player shaking off a hand, nothing in it. That's wrong. You don't answer a shirt tug by driving your elbow backwards into the man behind you. One of those is a nuisance foul. The other is a decision to hurt someone. Peque committed the first. Güler committed the second. Both are offences, and the idea that the second cancels out because the first happened is how you end up excusing anything.
Peque should have been punished too. Grabbing a player trying to spring a counter is unsporting and it goes unbooked far too often. If you want to be angry that holding gets waved away while the game rewards the holder, be angry. But that's a separate complaint, and it doesn't turn Güler's elbow into a clean act. Two wrongs happened in the space of a second, and the referee found neither.
Refereeing expert Iturralde González, looking at the footage, said: "It seems there is something there, but there was no clear replay to determine it. I see him extending his arm, but you can't see it making contact with his face because the images are very poor." That's honest. The cameras couldn't confirm contact, which is why this turned into a mess instead of a clean red. But the arm went back. That part is visible, and swinging it is reckless on its own terms. A yellow card just needs intent and recklessness. You don't need a forensic reconstruction of where it landed.
The procedure then made things worse. VAR spent about three minutes crawling through angles and declined to intervene, and people are selling that as Güler getting cleared. He wasn't. The video room can only step in for a clear and obvious error on a sending-off. Whether there's enough to overturn a red card is a different question from whether it was a foul at all. The referee, Mateu Busquets Ferrer, gave Güler nothing live, and nobody upstairs could force a card he never produced. The on-field call stood by default. The default was wrong.
The detail that should embarrass everyone: Busquets Ferrer found his cards afterwards, booking Dean Huijsen and Sevilla's Félix Correia for squaring up while the game was stopped. Two yellows for a shoving match, zero for the elbow that started it. Sevilla's Luis García Plaza was blunt: "It's a red card." Mourinho shrugged that he "haven't been able to see any image of the things they are talking about." One of those managers watched the incident honestly.
Güler scored five minutes later to put Madrid ahead, and they carried it into Clásico week at Camp Nou and a Champions League night against RB Leipzig. The result's safe, but the non-call still needs explaining. A player swung his arm at an opponent and the officials rewarded him with silence. That failure belongs to the referee who had the whistle and didn't blow it.
