When Real Madrid presidential candidate Enrique Riquelme appeared on the evening chat show “El Hormiguero” and announced that if he won Sunday’s election, he would bring Manchester City’s Rodri and Erling Haaland to the club, it was great showbiz. But it was also stealing a leaf directly out of the Florentino Perez Election Playbook.
Riquelme followed up, live on TV, by saying: “If I fail to fulfil either of these promises then here’s a notarized document where I guarantee I’ll pay the season tickets of the 100,000 Madrid socios [members] for the following season.”
It’s an extraordinarily bullish move — and has seen Manchester City insist in a statement on Thursday about Haaland that “there is no chance of this happening and there is no contractual clause to enable it” while also threatening legal action for “the use of our player image in this context” — but it harks back to precisely how the reign of the man he’s trying to unseat, Perez, began in 2000.
Perhaps you recall: it was a chapter in time that transfixed world football, broke a transfer record and kickstarted an even more venomous relationship between Madrid and Barcelona.
But time moves on. So here — in case you’re too young to have been glued to the soap opera that was the Spanish football market over a quarter of a century ago — is what happened; the seismic move on which Riquelme has decided to piggyback.
Luis Figo was by far Barcelona’s best player, but his club had renewed the contracts of a handful of his teammates, and he felt a little slighted.
Read more:Madrid’s Pérez vows $174M Galactico bid if re-elected
Perez had stood for Real Madrid presidency five years earlier, and failed, plus the incumbent president Lorenzo Sanz, had been racking up Champions League wins (1998 and 2000) so: 1) in theory, he should have been impregnable 2) he was in an extremely similar position to that of Don Florentino right now.
It was on July 11, 2000, that Perez held a news conference (rather than appearing on a jokey, lightweight TV show) and announced the famous phrase “Quiero decirles que si yo soy presidente del Real Madrid, Figo será jugador del Real Madrid!” — “I want you to know that if I’m made President of Real Madrid, Figo WILL become a Madrid player!”
The story had been leaked to the Madrid media on July 6 — this was the vastly anticipated and “bombshell” news conference confirming the shocking story.
Behind the scenes it was complete madness — Figo hadn’t known that his agent had made a very lucrative deal with Perez, nor had he believed it was even feasible that anyone could pay the “buyout” clause that had been inserted in his contract: 10 billion pesetas in those days, equivalent to €60 million.
That was the key.
Figo, as he has often explained since, didn’t really want to leave, tried to get Barcelona to offer him a vastly upgraded contract but, eventually, was manhandled by his agent, Jose Veiga, and Perez into accepting Madrid buying out his contract.
Read more:Haaland sits, Isak scores as Norway beats Sweden in warmup
They key thing back then (and this will be in play over the coming few weeks if Riquelme somehow parlays this killer play into election victory) was that a “rescission clause” (often just referred to as a clausula in Spanish parlance) meant that the victimized club (in that instance Barcelona and, theoretically, in today’s instance Manchester City) had no actual power to block the move.
If Figo (just like any other player who has a “get out” clause in his Spanish playing contract then or now) chooses to accept the offer made by the bullish buying club then his current employers, who actually own his contract, are absolutely powerless.
Whether that proves to be the case with Haaland remains to be seen, but he does indeed have such a clause in his contract.
What’s often forgotten is that Perez was, back then, distinctly the second favorite in the race to win those Madrid presidential elections, but the Figo promise, and the guarantee that he’d pay the Madrid socios their season ticket if his words weren’t fulfilled, utterly galvanized the voting. He duly won by over 3,000 votes and unleashed an era of glory, Galácticos and grand European domination.
Not that the power move was new even then.
Read more:Florentino Perez: I’ll announce ‘first big signing’ on Thursday
Florentino subsequently admitted: “I borrowed the whole idea from Santiago Bernabéu!” (prior to Perez, Madrid’s most legendary president).
“Don Santiago promised he’d make the stadium bigger, that he’d generate more revenue, and that he’d thus be able to buy the best players in the world.
“And so, he bought Alfredo Di Stéfano who was supposed to play for Barcelona that season, changed not just the history of Real Madrid, but the history of football itself.”
Perez, speaking in an interview in 2017, added: “I simply did the same thing. I promised that I’d bring in the best players in the world to solve our revenue issues. And that is exactly what happened.
“Initially, nobody believed the talk about Figo joining because, back in 2000, no one had ever paid €60 million. People simply couldn’t believe it — but then I spoke with Figo, and I convinced him.”
Read more:FIFA reverses World Cup water bottle ban after backlash
And if you’d like another indication of the power unleashed by the kind of promise Riquelme made this week, probably an even sneakier one than the Figo farrago, then you only have to look at the 2003 campaign via which Joan Laporta won his first Barcelona presidency.
Everybody who followed the story closely knew that not only had Madrid and Manchester United reached full agreement on the transfer of David Beckham, but that “Becks” keenly wanted to join Madrid.
Nevertheless, Laporta used his friendship with Pini Zahavi (agent to Barça head coach Hansi Flick to this day) and Zahavi’s link to United CEO Peter Kenyon to announce that Barcelona had reached an agreement with United to buy Beckham.
I was at the news conference that afternoon in Laporta’s campaign office in Paseig De Gracia and the effect was stunning.
Vice president elect Sandro Rosell stood up, explained the costs of the deal, read out a statement, which Kenyon had sent on United’s behalf and, by the letter of the law, it was all true.
Read more:Need a pre-World Cup soccer fix? There’s plenty to watch, if you know where to look
Barcelona had met United’s asking price, demonstrated how they’d pay in installments and, thus, the Old Trafford club were legitimately able to give Laporta a huge helping hand in the election polls just ahead of the vote by backing the news that they’d agreed to a fee for their world-famous No. 7 with Laporta if he became president.
Beckham wasn’t interested but kept quiet. Barcelona also promised to bring Ronaldinho, and succeeded in doing so, meaning that Laporta, having been an outsider like Perez three years earlier, and Riquelme this weekend, won hands down.
It is, if you like, a grander version of the “in the know” transfer gossipers on social media and the current phenomenon of “transfer gurus” who are in the pockets of certain mega-agents.
The footballing public crave big signings, shocks, jaw-dropping, unimaginable moves — it’s almost a sport in itself. Promising Rodri and Haaland is just a mega-version of the same trend of “give me more sexy transfer market stunners because it’s addictive.”
The difference being that Riquelme, were he to win, will then have to make good on his promises. Will it be enough for victory? We’ll find out the verdict on Sunday.
