Is Soccer’s Model Club Actually … Real Madrid?
The club is strutting into a future different from the one envisioned by its president, Florentino Pérez. But its prospects are as bright as ever.
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Florentino Pérez had a contented smile on his face, and with good reason. He had just watched Spain and Brazil share a thrilling, freewheeling draw at the stadium he has expensively, lavishly, reappointed. Now, Pérez, Real Madrid’s all-powerful president, found himself in a whitewashed tunnel, presented — completely by chance, obviously — with his favorite kind of photo opportunity.
To one side stood Vinícius Júnior, Real Madrid’s standard-bearer and main event, dutifully introducing the man who pays his wages to his Brazil teammates. A little further along the corridor, hurrying to pay obeisance, was Rodrygo, another of Pérez’s employees.
But Pérez’s focus was on Endrick, the 17-year-old star-in-waiting who will complete his long-awaited move to the Santiago Bernabéu this summer. To say the two of them shared a conversation would be pushing it: In footage of their brief meeting, Endrick does not appear to speak. After a handshake, Pérez utters only one line, but it is perfect. “We’re waiting for you here,” he said.
That kind of long-term planning feels just a little out of step with Real Madrid’s traditional modus operandi. The club identifies, correctly, as a titan, and — under Pérez’s stewardship, in particular — it has taken great pride in living the values associated with the classical definition of that term: impetuous, impulsive, irascible.
It fires coaches for failing to win the Champions League, signs players on the back of a stellar World Cup and airs a regular feature on its in-house television channel that has been interpreted as a pre-emptive attempt to influence and/or intimidate referees. Real Madrid has always been the sort of place that eats its own sons.
All of that remains hard-wired into the club’s fibers. In the past three years, Pérez has not only helped to concoct a Super League that was intended to reshape world soccer more to his liking, but defended it on a gaudy late-night talk show — a little like going on “Judge Judy” to announce the abolition of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — and then continued to promote it even after it was savaged by, well, just about everyone else.
But there is little question that there is something different about the current incarnation of Real Madrid. The club has always regarded itself as being the biggest, most powerful, most glamorous, most famous team not just in soccer, but in sports as a whole. Now, it is possible to make the case that it should be regarded as the best run, too.
A better gauge, though, is what will happen this summer. As well as Endrick, already anointed as the finest player of soccer’s new generation, Real Madrid is expected (at last) to sign Kylian Mbappé, the standout of the current one. They should be joined, too, by Alphonso Davies, the Bayern Munich and Canada left back.
Eagle-eyed fans can already buy Kylian Mbappé scarves outside the Bernabéu.Credit...Oscar Maya/EPA, via Shutterstock
All three deals showcase how adroitly Real Madrid now navigates the transfer market. Endrick is another special from Juni Calafat, the club’s recruitment chief, who has long been tasked with bringing the brightest prospects from around the world — and from South America in particular — to Madrid.
Mbappé has been a case study in patience, with Real Madrid by turns seducing the player and biding its time, slowly and carefully positioning itself as his only realistic route out of Paris St.-Germain, waiting until the economic conditions were right to sign a player currently employed by a club that is in effect an arm of a nation state.
It would not be the first club to admire — however begrudgingly — how well Real Madrid has adapted to a financial landscape that, as the Super League project demonstrated, seemed to have shifted against Europe’s old aristocrats.
Real Madrid does not have the money, for example, to bully Premier League teams into selling players, and so instead it signed Antonio Rüdiger from Chelsea on a free transfer. It retains an impressively productive academy — according to the analysis firm CIES, 97 of its graduates are playing professionally in Europe — but has also moved quickly to gobble up players like Eduardo Camavinga, Jude Bellingham and Aurelién Tchouaméni before they fall into English clutches.
The Brazilian forward Endrick at a Real Madrid game in December.Credit...Isabel Infantes/Reuters
The result is a club that, almost alone among the grand old teams of the continent, can look to the future with relish. Barcelona has mortgaged many tomorrows to pay for the sins of yesterday. Bayern Munich is about to hire its fourth coach in three years. Juventus is still reeling from the mass resignation of its board in 2022 amid allegations of fraudulent accounting.
It may, in many ways, remain an old-fashioned club, run as a personal fief by an omnipotent president. It does not pretend to be as data-driven, as avowedly modern, as Manchester City or Liverpool or Brighton, and it most definitely does not, at any point, feel any need whatsoever to tell anyone how clever it is.
But it is difficult to escape the impression that of all the game’s traditional elite, Real Madrid is now the one that needs a Super League the least. It is true that this is not the reality Florentino Pérez hoped to occupy in the spring of 2024. He wanted it to change, irrevocably, to suit his club. The converse, though, seems to have worked just as well. He has his modern stadium. He has his cluster of stars. The world remains, as it always was, much to Real Madrid’s liking.
