Florentino Pérez will continue as president of Real Madrid after winning their first elections in 20 years, paving the way for his plans to sell 5% of the club. Pérez, who has been president for 23 years across two spells – first between 2000 and 2006 and then since 2009, winning the last five elections unopposed. The 37-year-old challenger, Enrique Riquelme, lost the vote after 75,219 members exercised their right to vote. The results were held up after Riquelme challenged the validity of around 1,000 postal votes, of which over 400 were eventually struck off.
The victory means that José Mourinho should be formally announced as manager on Monday, with Madrid paying Benfica a €15m (£13m) release fee for the Portuguese coach. Pérez had also promised to make a bid of “at least €150m” on Tuesday for an unnamed “galactico” understood to be Michael Olise. Riquelme said he would appoint Raúl González Blanco as his sporting director and he would attempt to convince Jürgen Klopp to come as coach. He also said he was confident of signing Erling Haaland and Rodri.
Although the victory gives Pérez the mandate stay in power for five more years and push through his plans to change the club’s structure, taking the proposal to a members’ assembly, the margin of victory is smaller than had been anticipated. Pérez, under whose presidency Madrid have won seven European Cups and become the richest club in the world, had not been expected to face any opposition at all. Even when a challenger appeared, there was no doubt that he would win, and in all probability by a landslide. Ultimately, though, Pérez has successfully seen off his opponent and reinforced his position.
For Riquelme, it represents something of a success, if an ultimately empty one, at least in the short term. Having not foreseen Pérez’s decision to call snap elections, he was forced to put together a candidacy from scratch and a position of anonymity, meaning even standing could be seen as an achievement. Riquelme had contemplated standing in 2021 only to decide against it and these elections were widely seen as a first step towards making a future bid for power. But whether he will try again or get the opportunity to remains to be seen: he had campaigned against what he described as Pérez’s “privatisation” of the club and the risk that these would be Madrid’s last ever elections.After two years without a trophy, the president called these elections during an extraordinary, rambling press conference on 14 May. Just one year into his latest term, he had done so, it appeared, to flush out, expose and defeat an emerging and unprepared opposition – and perhaps without even having to face them.
The announcement surprised everyone, and there was little real sense of there being any threat to Pérez’s power. At that point few had even heard of Riquelme, an energy millionaire from Alicante who has business interests in Mexico. Pérez, who had not named him in the press conference but referred to a man who “speaks with a South American accent”, gave Riquelme a notoriety he did not have.
Pérez also gave Riquelme just 10 days to build a candidacy and comply with the strict regulations that control who stands – rules that Pérez had tightened as president. Riquelme wrote to Pérez requesting more time but was not given it. He also had to present a bank guarantee for €178m which had to be secured against his own personal wealth. An impossible task looked even more difficult when two Spanish banks refused, but Riquelme did eventually stand. He demanded three public debates but there were none.
The 14-day campaign, which no one had experienced in two decades in Madrid and which became quite a spectacle, largely revolved around Pérez’s plans to change the model of the club that has been in place since its foundation in 1902 and the reasons for it. Pérez said he wanted to protect fan ownership by giving membership a financial value and said he was “only” inviting investment as a way of measuring the value of the club.
Riquelme described Pérez’s Real Madrid as “like a feudal monarchy, the closest thing to a dictatorship” and questioned the role of Moroccan banker Anas Laghrari, who Pérez described as “like a son” and who has become increasingly powerful at the club. The past few years have been difficult ones for Pérez and not just on the pitch: he saw the Super League project collapse and the stadium rebuild encounter problems, unable to host the concerts that had been a key part of the project.
As the campaign grew in intensity, football came to the fore, each promise bigger than the last. Perez’s decision to sign José Mourinho had to be put on hold because of the elections, thus seeing the value of his release clause with Benfica increase, but he did eventually publicly announce what was an open secret: that the Portuguese would be his new manager. He also announced the signings of Denzel Dumfries and Ibrahima Konaté.
Riquelme brought Raúl, Fernando Hierro, Iker Casillas and Vicente del Bosque into his candidacy and announced his intention to sign Haaland and Rodri, promising to pay the members’ fees if he did not do so. The Norwegian’s agent denied any agreement and there was a denial too from the camp of Klopp, Riquelme’s preferred coach. Riquelme claimed that that he – a president who would not interfere with the manager’s work, unlike Pérez – would be able to convince the former Liverpool boss. Neither of those claims will have to be put to the test now after Pérez was returned to the presidency.
During the press conference at which Pérez called elections, he had declared “they’re going to have to shoot me to get me out, because I have the support of all Madrid’s members”. In the end, it wasn’t all of them but it was enough, his grip on power tightened and his presidency extended for at least another four years.
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