Is the model football club really Real Madrid? – 04/09/2024 – Sport

Florentino Pérez had a satisfied smile on his face, and with good reason. He had just watched Spain and Brazil share an exciting draw in the stadium that he had expensively and luxuriously renovated. Now Pérez, the all-powerful president of Real Madrid, found himself in a whitewashed tunnel, presented — completely by chance, obviously — with his favorite kind of photo opportunity.

On one side was Vinícius Júnior, Real Madrid’s standard-bearer and main attraction, dutifully introducing the man who pays his salary to his Brazil teammates. A little further down the hall, hurrying to pay respects, was Rodrygo, another of Pérez’s employees.

But Pérez’s focus was on Endrick, the 17-year-old star who will complete his long-awaited move to the Santiago Bernabéu this summer. To say the two had a conversation would be an exaggeration: in footage of their brief encounter, Endrick doesn’t appear to speak. After shaking hands, Pérez says just one sentence, but it’s perfect. “We’re waiting for you here,” he said.

Real Madrid have had Endrick in their sights for some time: The club announced that they had reached an agreement to sign him from Palmeiras three days before the 2022 World Cup final. in the most coveted prospect in world football, until he turned 18 in July this year.

This kind of long-term planning seems a little out of Real Madrid’s traditional style. The club rightly identifies itself as a titan, and — under Pérez’s leadership, in particular — has prided itself on living the values ​​associated with the classic definition of that term: impulsive, impetuous, irascible.

He fires coaches for failing to win the Champions League, signs players after a stellar World Cup and regularly airs on his internal television channel a program that has been interpreted as a pre-emptive attempt to influence and/or intimidate referees. Real Madrid has always been the kind of place that devours its own children.

All of this remains rooted in the club’s threads. Over the past three years, Pérez has not only helped conceive a Super League that aimed to reshape world football more to his liking, but defended it on a flashy late-night talk show — a bit like going on “Judge Judy” to announce the abolition of the five members permanent members of the UN Security Council—and continued to promote it even after it was slaughtered by, well, pretty much everyone.

But there is little doubt that there is something different about the current incarnation of Real Madrid. The club has always considered itself the biggest, most powerful, most glamorous, most famous team not just in football, but in sport as a whole. Now, it is possible to argue that it should also be considered best managed.

Their slightly absurd record in the Champions League proves that. In the last decade, it has won the club’s most prized tournament five times. If Carlo Ancelotti’s side fall to Manchester City in the next two weeks, it would be only the third time since 2010 that Real Madrid have failed to reach at least the semi-finals of Europe’s marquee competition.

A better indicator, however, is what will happen this summer. In addition to Endrick, already anointed as the best player of the new generation of football, it is expected that Real Madrid will finally sign Kylian Mbappé, the highlight of the current generation. They should also be joined by Bayern Munich and Canada left-back Alphonso Davies.

All three deals show how Real Madrid skillfully navigates the transfer market. Endrick is another special find for Juni Calafat, the club’s head of recruitment, who has long been tasked with bringing the best prospects from around the world — and South America in particular — to Madrid.

Mbappé has been a case study, with Real Madrid wooing the player and biding their time, slowly positioning themselves as their only realistic route out of Paris Saint-Germain, waiting until economic conditions were right to sign a player. currently employed by a club that is, in practice, an arm of a nation-state.

Davies, too, is a masterpiece of patience: Real Madrid will present Bayern Munich with the choice of losing him for a fee this summer, or for free when his contract expires in 2025. Bayern will resent it, it is Of course. But you’re familiar enough with this kind of intimidation method that you might secretly applaud a little too.

It wouldn’t be the first club to admire — albeit grudgingly — how well Real Madrid adapted to a financial scenario that, as the Superliga project demonstrated, seemed to have turned against Europe’s old aristocrats.

Real Madrid don’t have the money to intimidate Premier League teams into selling players, so instead they signed Antonio Rüdiger from Chelsea on a free transfer. The club maintains an impressively productive academy — according to analytics firm CIES, 97 of its graduates are playing professionally in Europe — but has also moved quickly to sign players like Eduardo Camavinga, Jude Bellingham and Aurelién Tchouaméni before they fall into the clutches English.

The result is a club that, almost alone among the continent’s big teams, can look to the future with enthusiasm. Barcelona mortgaged many tomorrows to pay for the sins of yesterday. Bayern Munich are about to hire their fourth coach in three years. Juventus is still reeling from the mass resignation of its board in 2022 amid allegations of fraudulent accounting.

On the other hand, next season Real Madrid should be able to field a midfield with Camavinga, Tchouaméni and Bellingham, and an attack with Rodrygo, Vinícius and Endrick. Where exactly Federico Valverde fits in is a mystery. It certainly doesn’t seem like the club’s fate depends on what Mbappé decides to do.

In many ways, the club remains antiquated, being run as a personal fiefdom by an omnipotent president. It doesn’t pretend to be as data-driven, as modern, as Manchester City, Liverpool or Brighton, and it definitely doesn’t at any point feel the need to tell anyone how smart it is.

But it’s difficult to escape the impression that, among all of football’s traditional elite, Real Madrid are now the ones that least need a Super League. It is true that this is not the reality that Florentino Pérez expected to occupy in the spring of 2024. he wanted her to change, irrevocably, to suit his club. The reverse, however, seems to have worked equally well. It has its modern stadium. It has its star cluster. The world continues as it always has been, much to Real Madrid’s liking.