Real Madrid’s Florentino Pérez may be gone, but the dressing-room divisions and disharmony at the club remain, writes Sid Lowe.
So, having been through four directors of football, six coaches and 20 players in just three years, Pérez finally sacked the man really responsible for Real Madrid’s crisis: himself.
After years of pseudo-coaches and pseudo-directors, powerless pawns in a real-life game of Championship Manager that has cost the club â,¬440-million in transfer fees, plus â,¬11-million a year per galáctico, Madrid’s real director of football and real coach fell on his sword at last. Sacking a third coach this season would have been too much, even for Pérez.
More significantly, by walking he avoids becoming the first man to preside over three successive seasons without a trophy since 1953, after Madrid were bundled out of the Champions League by Arsenal.
But even as he finally did the right thing, Pérez did the wrong thing. The man who attacked coach José Antonio Camacho for dumping Madrid right in it without stopping to ask why the sweaty-pitted one walked just four games into the season, has done exactly the same. Pérez departed, leaving furious directors and an institutional crisis, pointing the finger, laying bare divisions within the squad and turning simmering conflicts into open warfare.
Even as he accepted blame, Pérez shifted it. Admitting that there was little harmony in a dressing room that has long been divided, but trying to keep a lid on it, he insisted: ”I have educated the players badly. They got confused and thought they were great; some thought they had to play every game.”
Suddenly, he had become the victim, devoured by the galactic monster he had created; an incorrigible romantic destroyed by footballers whose only true love is filthy lucre. As one enormous banner at the Santiago Bernabéu put it last weekend: ”President, it wasn’t your fault. Out with the mercenaries!”
It was exactly what he would have wanted.
If anyone knows about filthy lucre it is he; if anyone wields power, the head of Spain’s largest construction company, electrical giant and advertising agency is your man.
The galácticos thought they had to play every game? Maybe, because they did have to play every game. The sight of David Beckham on the bench prompted Camacho’s departure, while leaving Ronaldo out was the last thing Mariano GarcÃÂa Remón did as coach — and the first thing Juan Ramón López Caro did as coach in the post-Pérez era. ”From now on,” he announced poetically, ”we will play with hombres, no con nombres [men, not names].”
Maybe now Madrid can be a football team once more. Under Pérez they were not, and the consequences were dire. The non-galácticos quickly became aware of their utter irrelevance, and came to resent an institution that forced them into summer tours instead of pre-season training, which stripped the coach of all authority and made a myth of meritocracy. ”This club has lost its soul,’ as one first-teamer put it.”
Before last Saturday’s 2-1 derby win over Atlético, the Bernabéu scoreboard projected a montage of Pérez’s greatest moments at the club to Oasis’s Don’t Look Back in Anger, in one last act of political spin doctoring. Pérez meets the King. Madrid wins the European Cup. Pérez kisses the Pope’s ring. Pérez presents the galácticos. Pérez lays the first brick at the new training ground. And so on.
But if all that, like Madrid’s escape from crippling debt and newfound solvency (if we can believe figures over which doubts have been raised), is Pérez’s legacy, there is more.
The club needs a complete overhaul and he has left a ticking time bomb. By departing with a dig at the players, he has left Ronaldo in the eye of the storm — yet another easy scapegoat — and easy prey for new president Fernando MartÃÂn and the Brazilian’s real nemesis: Raúl.
Smelling blood, the captain insisted that ”Florentino should name names”, but there was no need, for MartÃÂn immediately pulled out an iron fist, giving an aggressive speech in which he railed against a team of millionaires, demanded 24-hour dedication and physical perfection, and announced plans for a secret police force to spy on the players’ off-field behaviour.
With 82% of fans wanting him out, the target was obvious; MartÃÂn’s speech had Ronaldo’s name written all over it.