How Real Madrid conquered football’s new world to leave Barcelona behind

Even by Florentino Pérez’s standards, this was remarkable self-interest. It was the 2020–21 Uefa Champions League quarter-final, and the Real Madrid president had a sense of urgency as he prepared to meet his counterparts at Liverpool. The two clubs were opponents for this tie but also partners in the European Super League project, which was at that point only days from launch.

The grand plan was for the wealthiest clubs to break away from the Champions League, and Pérez was eager to tell the world. He wanted to bring the announcement forward to Thursday after the second leg of the Real Madrid vs Liverpool tie. The problem was that date happened to be 15 April, so Liverpool were completely unwilling to launch. Pérez couldn’t understand why not. It was diplomatically explained to him that this was the anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, a solemn day when Liverpool remembered the 97 supporters who lost their lives in a crush at a 1989 FA Cup match.

Pérez accepted that, but was still a bit bemused that there was such concern over “something that happened 30 years ago”. Those who remember the exchanges don’t see it as Pérez being intentionally disrespectful. It was more that he can never see past what matters to Real Madrid, and never accepts anything that isn’t guaranteed to keep the Spanish club at the top of football.

“Y así es,” the Real Madrid president would say, totally sure of his stance on anything as if it was a self-evident truth. That’s how it is. That’s how it has been for most of modern football history, at least. The great white sharks like Real Madrid and Barcelona got their way, with everything flowing down from there. Except, as Norwegian Football Federation president Lise Klaveness puts it, the game is in “a time of unique change”. That resistance to regulation has created a world that is now moving beyond the control of Pérez and the European industrialists that defined half a century of European football. It was why Silvio Berlusconi got out, selling AC Milan in 2017.

Football’s greed has caused the game to grow to a size where, as long forewarned, it is finally “eating itself”.

Barcelona themselves are one of many examples. Camp Nou is the starting point for a line that runs through all of this. In 2008, Pep Guardiola created a team that offered such a perfect vision of football that every autocracy wanted to appropriate it. This wasn’t just influence. It was global adulation. By 2024, Guardiola and most of Barcelona’s key figures had worked under state ownerships, while the crisis-racked Catalan club were being investigated for accusations of payments to a former referee. That was one of a number of similar cases that threatened the very legitimacy of football, the most prominent of which was the investigation into Manchester City for 100-plus alleged breaches of Premier League financial rules.

A confluence of events, not least the end of the Messi-Cristiano Ronaldo era, ensured it was the big Spanish two who first endured the most visible impact from the sportswashing era. Both had new choices to make, and new relationships with the state-owned clubs.

For Real Madrid, there were tense stand-offs over Neymar and then Kylian Mbappé. Pérez never went all out for the French star, leaving it in Mbappé’s hands before he eventually joined on a Bosman. The interpretation of this was that Pérez was mindful of what PSG did to Barcelona in 2017. That relationship was much more complex, partly because of what the Catalan club represent to so many.

Guardiola’s Barcelona made such a lasting impression on the game that everyone, and particularly state-linked clubs, wanted a piece of it. This great feat of creativity led to the destruction of the club, at least in its purest form. Barcelona were far from blameless in this. They made bad decision after bad decision, as if sent mad by the new world.

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Barcelona played a huge part in legitimising Qatar in sport, for one, becoming one of the first and biggest platforms for the state’s advertising. That initially took the form of the Qatar Foundation, which was the philanthropic organisation of Sheikha Moza bint Nasser Al Missned, one of the former emir’s consorts.

The two brothers, Sheikh Tamim and Sheikh Jassim, were delighted it pleased their mother. The intention was always for the space to go to a state company, though, which was eventually Qatar Airways. If the argument at that point was that Barcelona had lost their soul, the club was soon to be completely hollowed out. It wasn’t just PSG buying their players. Such was the worldwide fascination with Barcelona’s approach that the hierarchy tricked themselves into thinking they had developed a formula to solve football.

Their youth philosophy would keep producing stars, and the admiration for that would attract the biggest names in the game. It was intended to be the most virtuous of cycles. The problem, as often happens in such situations, was believing that most of this was down to design rather than luck. While it’s obviously true that Barcelona had the best academy set-up in the world, there was a generational level of fortune in how a historically good group came together at the same time. Xavi, Andrés Iniesta and Sergio Busquets spun the carousel that Messi stood on top of. This was always going to be impossible to recreate.

Barcelona had become high on their own supply, but that supply didn’t reach a high enough level. The club also became obsessed with star power, to the point that the squad became ludicrously top heavy. They symbolised the game’s capacity for eating itself.

Barcelona had spent so much on players that they couldn’t keep the greatest in their history. By the summer of Messi’s departure for PSG, in 2021, the re-elected club president Joan Laporta revealed their total debt stood at €1.35bn (£1.1bn). It almost exactly summed up a point by a rival executive. “You could give Barcelona €1m tomorrow and they’d spend €1.2bn on players.” Barcelona had taken the modern game to an extreme. PSG had taken their best players. City had taken their idea.

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It didn’t help that this was the hubristic peak of the wage race. In the summer of 2019, both Real Madrid and Barcelona had signed 28-year-olds for over €100m each, in Eden Hazard and Antoine Griezmann, respectively. The debts of the two Spanish clubs grew to at least €1bn each.

Barcelona had been driven to a form of football madness. Pérez brazenly complained it was difficult to “compete on a level playing field” after Real Madrid’s wage bill jumped by 32 per cent in one season just to keep their Champions League-winning squad together.

Barcelona and Real Madrid were suffering from the world they created. One response was to come up with an idea to change that world again.

It was merely a happy coincidence that the Super League served as a mass refinancing for the Spanish and Italian clubs. Barcelona and Real Madrid were even to receive an extra €30m each for the first two seasons. They would similarly be afforded the means to control the state-owned clubs and oligarchs, who in turn needed to stay at the top of the game for their own political purposes.

Underpinning it all, however, was an “intense resentment” at some bureaucrats in Nyon telling them how to run their businesses. “We know how to make this 100 times better,” one executive argued. It’s been described as “real masters of the universe stuff” and “self-made men dismissing regulators who hadn’t put in a penny”. The overwhelming counter-argument, of course, was that this was the collective system they’d bought into. The group had even been advised that the Champions League reforms, which they were still ostensibly negotiating, would give them everything they wanted anyway.

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It was no longer enough. Pérez, with the backing of Joel Glazer, was insistent on launching the Super League as soon as possible. Although an early issue was the lack of a figurehead, there was little doubt who the driving personality was. Pérez, in so many ways, personified Real Madrid. The abundance of entitlement was only matched by the absence of self-doubt.

“We created Fifa,” he’d say. “We are the reason the Champions League is what it is.” Some saw the entire Super League as an act of desperation, rather than power, out of the fear Real Madrid might be losing their supremacy. Pérez himself was a very specific product of his country’s socio-economic history. Spain was one of only two European dictatorships that hadn’t been toppled in the Second World War, along with Portugal, and General Franco attempted to rebuild the economy on three main pillars: services, tourism and entertainment.

Banks, construction and football were integral to this, with that supercharged by prime minister José María Aznar’s reprogramming of Spanish capitalism in the 1990s. Pérez traversed all of this, primarily through his construction company, ACS. The club’s international profile also helped secure contracts around the world. It was through ACS he developed a relationship with Key Capital Partners. The nexus is el palco, the presidential box at Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu stadium, which is described as like Davos in a royal court.

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It was from there that Pérez, himself viewed as a “Spanish oligarch”, is reported to have told one politician that “Real Madrid is a Spanish brand standing above the government”. So much for it being the people’s club owned by members who vote on presidents. The reality is that Pérez has made the statutes so limiting – time served as a director, a huge deposit – that he is one of few possible candidates. It is within this context, as well as the media-industrial complex around the club, that Pérez is completely unquestioned. One Real Madrid legend, Emiliano Butragueño, describes him as “a superior being”, another in Roberto Carlos says he is a “grand visionary”.

Driving this vision is the idea of “ilusión”, which broadly means excitement from spectacle. It is why Pérez became obsessed with stars, often to the detriment of his team. The first galacticos unravelled when the president insisted on sacrificing the defensive Claude Makelele for David Beckham. Pérez has belatedly empowered Brazilian technical director Juni Calafat to realign the club around precocious talent such as Jude Bellingham, but that decision was a necessity from the new world. Pérez needed to reshape it again. The Super League was the ultimate idea of ilusión.

That just wasn’t the emotion when the story broke. There was shock and then, as one director put it, “a tsunami of s***”.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson literally just turned to advisers. “Is this good or bad?” When told “bad”, Johnson immediately made a staff member ring a Super League executive to say any deal with the English clubs was off.

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Private capital was one solution, even though both are supposed to be ring-fenced by supporter ownership, a virtue offset by the desperation to compete. Sixth Street Partners did a €207.5m deal with Barcelona for 10 per cent of TV rights, and a €380m deal with Real Madrid for 30 per cent of stadium operations. These decisions led to bafflement within football, but also concern that such “indirect participation” may be more widespread.

So, the wage race has driven the modern game to the brink, its impetus inadvertently articulated by Barcelona president Laporta: “Winning is a universal human emotion.” So are frustration, anger, panic and existential dread, all of which Barcelona have felt in the last few years. Their modern story is quite the morality tale. Barcelona displayed an ideal of football on the pitch, before showing how grim the industry can be off it.

As part of the same downfall, they have gone from inspiring the world through their play to potentially undermining trust in the sport. The Caso Negreira, where Barcelona have been investigated for payments to a former referee between 2000 and 2018, may change how football’s most influential era is perceived. Its potential effects, along with the Manchester City case, could have more drastic effects for its future. Barcelona have insisted this was all “very normal” and just for “scouting reports”. City maintain their innocence.

Unlike Barcelona, Real Madrid astutely navigated the new world so well that they were eventually able to come right back around and pay a huge contract to Mbappé. Legacy does have a lasting power. That’s how it is, as Pérez would say.

States of Play by Miguel Delaney publishes with Seven Dials on 7 November, the book can be pre-ordered here