FOR A second straight day at the weekend, protests by La Liga players against staging a regular season game in Miami in December were censored or not fully broadcast for television audiences.

The television feed of Barcelona’s home game against Girona switched right before kick-off to an exterior view of the stadium which only showed part of the field from distance. That impeded home audiences from seeing the teams’ players standing still for the first 15 seconds in opposition to La Liga’s plan to hold the Barcelona-Villarreal game across the Atlantic on December 20.

The broadcasts of the initial moments after kick-off of the day’s other three games — Sevilla-Mallorca, Villarreal-Real Betis and Atletico Madrid-Osasuna — focused closely from directly above on the centre circle, instead of taking a wide angle of the field.

Barcelona’s and Villarreal’s players joined the protests even though they were exempted by the Spanish football players’ association which organised it.

“We were not part of the [protest] but we felt that we needed to follow along out of respect for our fellow professionals,” Barcelona midfielder Pedri Gonzalez said after his team’s 2-1 win.

The players’ union announced the protest plans on Friday, saying all the captains of the top flight teams supported it for games in the ninth round from Friday through to tomorrow.

The play-by-play commentator on Saturday did briefly mention the protest, in contrast to Friday when it was completely censored from the broadcast of Oviedo-Espanyol. For that first protest, TV audiences saw only the exterior of the stadium for the first 25 seconds after kickoff.

The union said the symbolic action was to protest the “lack of transparency, dialogue and coherence of La Liga regarding the possibility of playing a game in the United States.”

Spain’s football supporters association, FASFE, applauded the players’ protest against what it called “La Liga’s obsession with going forward with its demented plan to rob our communities of [football].”

The league argues the game will be good for promoting Spanish football globally.