- The Observer,
- Sunday September 15 2002
The clock was ticking, the deadline for clinching the transfer of Ronaldo ( El Fenomino ) from Inter Milan to Real Madrid was just hours away, when Florentino Pérez, the Real president, smelt a rat - one with a familiar whiff to it.
Barcelona, the old enemy, had laid a trap - a trap, he suspected, intended to scupper the deal, to snatch the prize from Real's hands, at the very last moment. Pérez conveyed his suspicions several times to Inter by phone during the course of the fateful day - three weeks ago - but Inter refused at first to believe that a club as august as Barcelona would be capable of doing anything so ignoble.
The time limit for signing new players, according to Uefa rules, was that very night, when the clock struck 12. The day before, in what seemed like good faith, Barcelona had joined Operation Ronaldo, a poker game that had been going on all summer. On that Friday, Barcelona's president, Joan Gaspart, talked to Pérez in Monte Carlo during a meeting of the so-called 'G14' - the richest football clubs in Europe. Gaspart informed Pérez that he wished to buy the Real Madrid striker, Fernando Morientes. Pérez, a man who keeps his hand extremely close to his chest, must have struggled to contain his delight. Not only was Morientes very much on the market, his sale was the key that would unlock the door to Ronaldo, that would consummate Pérez's dream of constructing the most dazzling football team in the history of the game.
The deal, announced as a fait accompli on the Saturday in all the Spanish newspapers, was a cash-plus-player arrangement that would look like this: Real Madrid would give Morientes to Internazionale of Milan who would instantly sell him on to Barcelona; Real would also give Inter a large sum of cash; then Ronaldo would move from Inter to Real Madrid. During the Saturday morning, Barcelona started to haggle with Inter over Morientes' price, prompting Pérez to suspect that Gaspart might be playing dirty. Inter, far from heeding Pérez's warnings, were so convinced the deal would go through that they went ahead that very afternoon and signed Ronaldo's replacement, Hernan Crespo from Lazio, even before they had formally sold Ronaldo to Real.
So when at nine that night, with three hours to the final deadline, Barcelona called Inter to say they had changed their minds, they no longer wished to sign Morientes, 'the walls shook' at the Milan club, as a Real insider put it, with the oaths, the cries of despair and rage, of the Inter directors. Pérez, however, did not lose his cool. He had known what to expect and he had hatched a Plan B.
He phoned the Inter people, whose chief executive Massimo Moratti was in a state of shock, and told them to stay calm. 'Come on,' Pérez said. 'Let's get to work.' As if by magic, a deal - or, as they called it in Spain, the Ronaldo soap opera - that had been going on and off and on again for 60 days was wrapped up in a matter of 15 minutes. Real agreed to pay €35million (£22m) to Inter, plus one of a choice of Real players - or a further €10m in cash - in December. One of the players available to Inter would be Steve McManaman, but their first choice - it is no secret - would be the Argentine Santiago Solari.
So everybody, come midnight, was happy. Ronaldo because he was desperate to play at Real Madrid; Real Madrid because they madly wanted Ronaldo; and Inter because they reckoned the loss of Ronaldo was more than mitigated by what they received in exchange. Everybody was happy, that is, except Barcelona and in particular Gaspart, a man who ascended to the presidency of his club in the summer of 2000, at exactly the same time as Pérez took over at Real Madrid, and since then has found himself cast, with ever more uncanny similitude, in the role of an envious, bitter, smarting Salieri to Pérez's soaring Mozart.
There has never been a team like the Real Madrid that Pérez has built. A team that so completely monopolised the best of the world's available attacking talent. When the European and world players of the year are chosen in December it's going to be an in-house contest between the European Cup winners Zinedine Zidane and Raúl, the World Cup winner Ronaldo, and the winner of both Roberto Carlos. Or can anyone come up with anybody else's name? And, barring injuries to a couple of the above, it seems hard to imagine Fifa's 'Team of the twentieth century' not winning their fourth European Cup in six years (and tenth in 47) at Old Trafford next May. Anyone who saw Real Madrid's first game of the Spanish season against Espanyol, a scintillating 2-0 victory (without Ronaldo), and then saw Manchester United's drab 1-0 victory over Middlesbrough 24 hours later could only have come away with one impression: that Real are light years ahead of the one football club in the world that is richer than they are. The manner in which they had demolished Feyenoord 3-1 in the European Super Cup three days earlier left the Dutch manager shaking his head at the end, openly acknowledging that Real were on another planet.
Danny Blanchflower once said that the most important thing in football was not winning. 'The game,' the Tottenham and Northern Ireland star said, 'is about glory. It is about doing things with style.' And that precisely is the dominant ethos at Real Madrid right now. It always has been, ever since the great days of di Stefano, Puskas and Gento when they won five European Cups in succession. Now they are doing it again, putting principle into glorious practice. Because in a game in which experience shows that results are never certain, in which one may go ahead and predict that Real will finish the season empty-handed and not be deemed a madman, there is one thing that one can state without fear of contradiction: that, at their best, Real's first XI will be providing the world with the most exquisite football there is.
It was true last season. And, in the light of the way in which they have started this season, beating, for example, San Sebastian de los Reyes 8-1 in the Spanish Cup last week, it is more true now. This Real Madrid look a lot stronger, sharper and flashier than the one that defeated Bayer Leverkusen at Hampden Park in May.
There are at least three reasons for this. One is that, as Roberto Carlos himself admitted, some of the stars were conspicuously not playing last season in top gear, were deliberately saving their energies for the World Cup, while now their solitary purpose is to do battle for the colours of Real Madrid. Two, Zidane, who joined the club a year ago, took time to settle into the team but now, having enjoyed a longer summer rest than he might initially have expected, is commandeering the midfield with the intelligence, elegance, authority and ball-playing ease - unmatched since Maradona - of a man who has come to believe it was his God-given destiny to spend his best years at Real. Three, Luis Figo spent the first six months of this year struggling to shake off an ankle injury; today he is fitter and lighter and looks as if he is close to becoming once again the most mesmerising, most menacing right-winger in the game.
Roberto Carlos, meanwhile, just seems to get better. That is to say, out of this world. It was true before but it is more true now: having Roberto Carlos on your team is like playing with 12 men. He does not need to defend because he keeps the entire right side of any opposing team constantly preoccupied with containing his never-less-than-lethal attacking threat. How many left-backs pop up in the rival penalty area at the end of a dizzying string of one-touch passes, as happened against Feyenoord in the Super Cup, to crash the ball into the roof of the net with their right foot? Next moment, of course, he is pelting back into defence behind a dreamily presumptuous rival winger and cutting him down with the cleanest, sharpest tackle you will ever see.
In truth, Roberto Carlos is the phenomenon of nature, not the physically flawed Ronaldo. But, if he stays fit for the next three or four years, of what wonders will Ronaldo be capable alongside Raúl? Since the invention of the twin strike force there has never been, potentially, a more formidable pair. Or right up there, at the very least, with Tostão and Jairzinho, the men who led the line of the greatest football team ever: Brazil 1970. The Spaniard, wiry like Tostão, is a relentless goalscorer but, possessing more guile than pace, he prefers to play in the inside-forward position, just behind the out-and-out striker. Ronaldo, all power and panache, only knows how to score goals. If the two strike up anything like a telepathic relationship then no defence will be safe.
The rest of the team is not bad either. Makelele is the perfect defensive midfielder: tireless, shrewd, powerful in the tackle, releases the ball quickly and accurately - usually to Zidane. Esteban Cambiasso, the 22-year-old Argentine who looks like he will be the other starter in midfield, could be the find of the year in Europe. Fernando Hierro is one of those centre-halfs whom age seemingly cannot weary. Ivan Helguera, like Hierro, an ex-midfielder who has belatedly discovered his fate to be a central defender, is simply brilliant at the back. Michel Salgado, the right-back, is the least accomplished member of Real's starting XI, but he is Garrincha compared to Gary Neville. And the goalkeeper Iker Casillas, the baby of the side at 21 but already the main man in the Spanish national team, seems to possess much of that half-mad, they-shall-not-pass quality of Oliver Kahn.
The surprising thing is that while everybody in Spain talks of the Pérez 'revolution', only three players have been bought since he became club president three years ago. But what a threesome! Zidane, Ronaldo and Figo are the most expensive players in history. Between them they have won the World Player of the Year trophy five out of the last six times. Each one of them is so influential, each one of them is - as the Spanish say, without much sense of the English origin of the word - such a 'crack' that their individual presence on the field alters the very character of a team, conveys the impression that not just one player has changed, but that everything has. That, as Pérez puts it, the team has undergone a qualitative change.
Pérez is a man who thinks big and buys big. His philosophy is absolutely clear. It's the philosophy, as he says, of 'the Zidanes and the Pavóns'. Pavón is the name of a promising central defender who came up through the Real youth ranks. What Pérez means by 'the Zidanes and the Pavons' is that he is prepared to buy the very best and most expensive players in the world, but only the very best.
For the rest, he would rather depend on his youth teams. 'But from the Pavóns we get Raúls,' Pérez recently told El País . 'I remember the great Milan side had three extraordinary Dutchmen - Van Basten, Gullit and Rijkaard - but people sometimes forget they also had Baresi, Maldini, Donadoni, Ancelotti.' That said, here is the Pérez position on purchasing new players: 'It's better to spend €60m on a player who is recognised as world-class than €30m on a player reputed to have great promise. Of that I have no doubt. If you want to take a risk, go for your youth players; if you are going to spend, go for those players whose quality is not in doubt.' It's a philosophy based as much on a conception of the club as the world centre of footballing excellence, he maintains, as on a pragmatic understanding of the way money works.
'Real Madrid is a great club which will only remain a great club so long as Figo and Zidane join us, so long as Roberto Carlos and Raúl stay. When we were in debt people suggested the idea of selling Raúl and Roberto Carlos: how could anyone think such a thing? The image of Real Madrid has to correspond with those of its players. Because the best thing we have is our brand name.' Which brings us to the economics of spending big. 'Our strategy is very clear: at Real Madrid we have to have the best. Why? Because they represent the best return on your investment. And not only on the field of play. When you sign a star player the club gains in its international projection and that translates into economic gains. Figo sells hundreds of thousands of shirts and, at €60 a shirt, we're talking of many millions of euros. Simple as that. Besides, the economic repercussions spread wider for a club like ours that owns franchises, sells licensed products, trades on the image of its players. With players like Figo in your club you cannot help but do good business.'
The business possibilities offered by the acquisition of Ronaldo, as Pérez was the first to point out last week, are of course enormous. Especially, following his performance in the World Cup in the Far East, where Real Madrid have so far lagged well behind Manchester United in terms of popular appeal.
The money spent on buying Ronaldo could well turn out to be peanuts compared to the returns he will bring. For, in 'universalising' Real's brand name, as Pérez puts it, not only do you sell more shirts in the short term, you consolidate the power and appeal of the club years, possibly decades, into the future. (One might well ask, would Manchester United be as huge as they are today had Charlton, Best and Law not played for them together back in 1968?) That's why Pérez was so visibly thrilled after he had put pen to paper on the Ronaldo deal.
That was why he was unfazed when Barcelona committed their, so to speak, injury-time professional foul. But there was another reason why he was so unfazed; why even his normally ice-cool right-hand man, Real Madrid director general Jorge Valdano, was sweating buckets as the negotiations for Ronaldo came to their agonising conclusion. Valdano reflected after the ordeal was over that a master's course he had done in negotiations at Harvard had been 'child's play' compared to the contortions that had been required to sign up Ronaldo. And Valdano, a World Cup winner with Argentina, who would be a prime candidate for the title of most intelligent football player who ever lived, is a man whose words should not be taken lightly.
The truth is, however, that for the remarkable Señor Pérez, Operation Ronaldo was child's play. And so, for Pérez, is everything else related to Real Madrid.
Football is Perez's hobby. Prising the likes of Luis Figo away from Barcelona, thus engendering the undying loathing and lust for revenge of small-timers like Gaspart, and the likes of Zidane from Juventus, and Ronaldo from Inter Milan: that's what Pérez does for light relief, in his spare time.
What is 35, 40, 60 million euros for a man reckoned to be worth at least €600m who runs a company that operates in 50 countries, employs 30,000 people and has an annual turnover in excess of €4 billion? ACS is Spain's third biggest construction company and, if an expected merger goes through, will soon become the biggest. Not an awful lot. In the same way that buying a football player is not all that big a deal when what you do in your day job is compete with multi-nationals for the construction of mighty bridges and motorways hundreds of kilometres long.
Sorting out the financial mess Real Madrid were in after he won the club's presidential elections in July 2000 did represent something of a challenge, though. Cooked books, black-money expenditure, chaotic accounting and monthly expenditure exceeding monthly income by the amount it would take to buy half of Ronaldo - that's what he found when he took over. A sort of footballing Enron.
A meticulous man, son of an ironmonger, one of whose favourite phrases was 'each screw in its right box', he restored order in the administration by appointing good people, notably the brilliant Valdano to run the sporting side of the operation. He sorted out the finances by one ingenious stroke. He sold the land where Real Madrid have their training ground, prize developers' land in central Madrid, for a vast fortune: or a fortune vast enough, at any rate, to balance the books and pay for Figo, Zidane and Ronaldo.
Many have said it was a dodgy deal. And it is true that Pérez, who was in politics during Spain's democratic transition in the mid-to-late 1970s, has friends in high places. He knows prime minister José María Aznar well and two cabinet ministers are among his closest friends. There again, the land is genuinely valuable and Real, who bought it when it was dry farmland, did own it for 50 years. And, if there was something not entirely fair and square about the deal, if Pérez did capitalise on his personal contacts and Real Madrid's name, that tends to be the way of the world. Ask the former proprietor of the Texas Rangers baseball team, George W Bush.
Pérez, however, is a man who has risen to where he has on his own merits. By extraordinary dedication and hard work. And he is not sleazy, in stark contrast to his predecessor at Real, Lorenzo Sanz, a man who could - and did - make a £1,000 suit look cheap.
Pérez belongs to a class of Spaniard not known abroad but common, even typical, in the Meseta , the arid plains of Castille. He is hard, dry, austere, persistent, driven. You look at him and you understand a little better how a handful of conquistadors conquered Mexico and Peru. He is affable, in an ironic sort of way, but his habits reveal the kind of man he really is. He always, always wears a blue shirt; always a blue jacket and a blue tie. Occasionally, when it comes to his trousers, he will deviate into grey. He rises early and goes to bed at 10. He shuns television interviews and - in total contrast to the voluble Sanz - never comments on a game. He is so self-effacing he does not even own a car. And though he is always eating out, he does not like food. 'I don't like eating,' he revealed in a recent interview with El Mundo . 'I do it because I have to. Neither do I drink. I just smoke. Marlboros.' His one weakness, apart from tobacco, is football. 'I am essentially the president of ACS,' he says, 'and my leisure moments, instead of dedicating them to something else, I dedicate to Real Madrid. For me, dedicating that time to the club is a privilege and a pleasure. I don't play golf. I don't hunt. My free time I spend on Real Madrid.'
It's probably the most productive use free time has been put to in the history of the football world. There are, of course, aside from the players, two or three full-time employees who have made their contribution to the Real cause.
Valdano commands the complete respect of the players, which is no small thing with such a bunch of multi-millionaire mega-celebrities. And he commands the complete attention of Pérez when the issue arises of buying or selling a player. (If one wants the measure of what an exceptional football man Valdano is, consider this: when he was player at Real Madrid in the late 1980s he used to pen columns in El País , among other newspapers, criticising Ronald Reagan's policies in Latin America.)
And there is also the matter of the coach, Vicente del Bosque. He does take training sessions; he does select the team; he does decide on substitutions. And, himself a former player, he has as canny a knowledge of the game as anybody. But it is hard to imagine a man with a personality more at odds with the glamour of the club that employs him and the players he coaches.
He is so low-key that if you met him and did not know who he was you would imagine he was a quietly spoken baker in Salamanca, which is precisely where he is from, and where still today he feels most at home. Originally he was appointed as a stop gap, to provide cover after the abrupt departure of John Toshack at the end of 1999. And yet both Pérez and Valdano agree that he is the best man for the job. So much so that last season they extended his contract.
Because they have judged that his quiet avuncular style offers the best recipe for keeping in check the mighty egos that inhabit the Real dressing room. And they have judged correctly, because perhaps the most surprising thing about the Real Madrid team is how psychologically balanced they appear to be. According to conventional wisdom, it is dangerous to include more than two big, fiercely ambitious, headstrong talents in the same side - they are said to neutralise each other and undermine the team. Well, it remains to be seen what happens when Ronaldo takes the field in 20 days' time, as promised, but the likes of Figo, Zidane, Roberto Carlos and Raúl give every impression of being famous friends.
It would be a surprise, though, if Ronaldo did not fit in. He is known to be a huge admirer of Zidane, as a person and as a player. Zidane himself has already said he is delighted at the prospect of playing alongside Ronaldo.
Ronaldo and Figo both played together, to great effect, for Bobby Robson's Barcelona. But most of all Ronaldo comes to Real Madrid with a bounce in his stride, with a song in his heart. He revealed in an interview with Observer Sport Monthly that he did not like Italian football, that it was more like chess than the game he knew, that he vastly preferred the more open Spanish game - the best in Europe, in his estimation.
He also said in that interview that he had a keen sense of the passage of time, that he wanted to make the very most of the few years remaining in his football career. It does not take much to see, therefore, why he was so anxious to join Real Madrid; why he even agreed to repay Inter a sum of up to $3m in the event that, as a consequence of the move, they lost out on money from their sponsors.
Ronaldo wanted to enjoy the beautiful game again and score loads of goals. It is hard to see how, if he is fit, anyone will be able to stop him. Because the line of attack of Real Madrid is now so potent and so wide. You need to defend against Roberto Carlos on the left and Figo down the right. Preferably with two men on each. And then you've got Zidane, Raúl and Ronaldo coming down the middle. The instant the defence has plugged one hole, a new one opens up. And against players with such extraordinary ball control, with such an impeccable first touch, the one-twos become one-two-three-four-fives.
The ball, as the spectacles already provided this season have shown, travels towards the rival penalty area like a pinball. And when it arrives there, likely as not, it will end up at the feet of any one of five players, all proven goal-scorers, who would make it into the World XI of just about every football coach.
Del Bosque, in a measure of the expectations that have arisen, warned on Thursday that his team would not be 'invincible'. Probably not. The impertinent likes of Deportivo la Coruña in Spain, and Bayern Munich in Europe, will give them a run for their money, on a good day. But the nearest thing yet to real-life fantasy football is what's in store this season from Real Madrid, the most exciting team in football - at club or international level - by far. All over the world mouths are watering at the prospect of watching them play.
Real Madrid: vital statistics
Founded: 1902
European Cup: 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1966, 1998, 2000, 2002
Spanish League: 28 times since 1932
Spanish Cup: 17 wins since 1905
Spanish Super Cup: 6 wins since 1998
Uefa Cup: 1985, 1986
European Super Cup: 2002
World Club Championship: 1960, 1998
Substitutes: César, Carlos Sánchez; Oscar Miñambres, Francisco Pavón, Rubén, Borja; Steve McManaman, Guti, Raúl Bravo, Flavio Conceiçao, Albert Celades, Santiago Solari, Valdo; Fernando Morientes, Jorge López Marco Tote, Javier García Portillo
