Your Future Dream is a Shopping Scheme: Florentino Perez Returns

By: Dan | July 9th, 2009

Compared to many people, I am fairly ambivalent about Real Madrid. Though they would definitely be categorized as a team that inspires a lot of hatred, under normal circumstances this hatred is mostly legitimate, sporting-inspired antipathy from opposing supporters. It’s safe to say that when Florentino Perez is involved, circumstances cease to be normal. His reemergence definitely pushes me into the anti-Madrid camp, but that’s purely a personal problem. What I, categorically, do not understand is how Real Madrid and their supporters can welcome back this man who has proven to be so disastrous for the club and for football in general.

When we last encountered Florentino Perez, he was ashamedly scurrying away from the flaming ruins of the galacticos. As everyone will remember all too well, the galacticos project was based on signing famous, attacking players, regardless of whether or not the team actually needed them. The likes of David Beckham, Michael Owen, and Julio Baptista, among others, were brought in, while Claude Makelele and Fernando Hierro were unceremoniously shown the exit. The defensive, unglamorous positions were to be filled by youth team products; at the time this policy was christened ‘Zidanes y Pavons.’

Obviously, the whole thing turned into a disaster. The occasional party tricks that the galacticos were able to put together could not compensate for the utter incapability of the Pavons to fulfill their responsibilities. Real Madrid endured its longest period of time without winning a single trophy in fifty years. Each failure increased the desperation at the club, which began to go through managers by the dozen; the fact that rivals Barcelona were enjoying a renaissance led by Ronaldinho and manager Frank Rijkaard, while playing the type of football Madrid aspired to, only made things worse.

The official Perez propaganda line was that a ‘new football’ that defied the conventional wisdom of the stodgy, joyless, tactically obsessed eggheads was being created. At one point, Perez claimed that successful football was as simple as assembling the most talented players and letting them display their talents to the world. For some reason, there were those in the media that willingly bought into these declarations and treated Perez as some kind of purist visionary, devoted to a transcendental form of the beautiful game. The more skeptical among us might argue that these statements were lowest common denominator pablum that retroactively tried to justify turning one of the grandest institutions in football into a shirt selling enterprise. Ultimately, the original galacticos era probably did more to sully the reputation of Real Madrid than anything else in the club’s history.

So, why on earth is Real Madrid and its supporters so happy to welcome Florentino Perez back and allow him to repeat everything that happened the first time around on a grader scale? I suppose that Madrid never actually recovered from the first galacticos era. Reversing the damage done should have been a long term, painstaking rebuilding of the squad, along with a change the club’s business ethos. The deeper issues facing Madrid were never resolved; they continue attempting to solve every problem by buying more players. Ramon Calderon failed to bring in the bigger names he promised and the ever present wildly unrealistic expectations of the fans prevented any significant, lasting changes from taking effect. When Fabio Capello’s makeshift, slightly more defensive Real Madrid gleefully seized upon the league title that Barcelona threw away, old habits immediately kicked in. Fans ignored the improbable nature of that title win and decided that if Madrid were good enough to win the title again, they would have to do it in the traditional style.

Now that Florentino Perez is back, and buying every big name he possibly can, it’s worthwhile to revisit the real implications of his footballing philosophy. Basically, he is the leading proponent of football as profit. A lot of it is boilerplate super league stuff; the clubs that aren’t part of the elite are there simply to make up the numbers. In the 2004 hagiography of the first Perez regime, White Angels, journalist John Carlin constantly referred to every club in Spain apart from Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia along the lines of ‘minnows that no one outside their own cities had ever heard of.’ When these saucy, upstart ‘minnows’ had the temerity to defeat Real Madrid, as Zaragoza did in that season’s Copa Del Rey final, it was an act of pure effrontery.

Sadly, a lot of this is old news. What keeps Perez and Real Madrid in the forefront of the profit seeking movement is their ability to manipulate history. When English clubs employ the borrow and spend method to saturate the market, especially the emerging markets, with their name, they are rightly criticized. By compressing the achievements of Di Stefano, Gento, Butragueño, Sanchez, and Raul into a single brand name, the cash grabbing nature of the galacticos is obscured.

Long term and dedicated followers of the game aren’t likely to be fooled by Madrid’s PR onslaught. The real danger, as always, lies in the realm of perception. The galacticos circus is bound to stir up excitement and create new fans, who will buy the new Ronaldo jersey and view the messy state of affairs as perfectly normal, the same way that the breakaway Premier League and the top heavy Champions League are now seen as normal, and objections to this consolidation of power marks you, in many circles, as an out of touch, luddite agitator.