Against its vocation as a club imbued with supreme institutional value in football, Real Madrid refused to attend the Ballon d’Or gala, an award with 68 years of history. It is part of a symbolic landscape that in these times has acquired enormous importance in the commercial chapter. Real Madrid knows this and has never hesitated to boast of this type of recognition. They provide it with an extra shine that its president, Florentino Pérez, takes advantage of to proclaim from the four winds the leadership of the club, to the point of internalizing a heritage idea of football: it is his property, it belongs to him.
Florentino Pérez usually says in private that everyone is from Madrid, even if they don’t know it. It may sound like a joke, but it is not. Behind the pristine façade of the successful businessman, discreet in his manners, icy in his public behavior, hides an irreducible fan who reduces the apparent fanaticism of the Gils, Gaspart and Lopera to the category of flyweights. Unlike them, who could never avoid an air of humorous comedy, Florentino is a master of control who reconciles with mathematical accuracy a vast network of objectives, defined by the thirst for power, both inside and outside of football. However, something has changed in recent years and the refusal to attend the Ballon d’Or party points to a curious drift.
Aitana and Rodri make history for Spanish football by winning the Ballon d’Or
Real Madrid’s rudeness can be considered as an act of patrimonial arrogance or as a bad loser’s act, after the appointment of Rodri and not Vinícius. The fact is that 100 journalists from as many countries chose the phenomenal midfielder of Manchester City and the team that won Euro 2024, with added value: Rodri is the first Spanish footballer to receive the Ballon d’Or since Luis Suárez in 1960. Probably He will not be surprised by the considerable rejection that the award has provoked in his own country. In these questions of representativeness, Florentino Pérez has always defended that Real Madrid is the authentic Spanish brand in football, although the presence of national players in the team is almost testimonial. Both in the 2010 World Cup –Mourinho effect– and this year in the Euro Cup –Ballon d’Or effect–, the success of the national team has registered an immediate conflict.
The Ballon d’Or episode reveals an isolationist version of Real Madrid, increasingly detached from the institutional system to which it attached so much value. In April 2021 he led the creation of the Super League, deactivated due to pressure from the fans of the English teams. All the owners, most of them North American, apologized to the followers, as did the American bank JP Morgan, which financed the operation. For a bank to apologize for its poor decisions is a real event.
Madrid has entered a conflictive frenzy in the last four years, with negative or uncertain results. In addition to the Super League, where it now only finds the support of Barça, it maintains a bitter battle with the Spanish Professional League and faces in court the neighborhood resistance in the Chamartín neighborhood, which has taken the club to court and has achieved that, for the moment, the series of concerts at the remodeled Bernabéu, the gold mine planned by the president of Real Madrid, is cancelled. In all cases, Florentino Pérez, the master of political, economic, business and sporting control, has been overcome by the combative response of the street or the metaphor of the street: the vast majority of Spanish clubs, English fans, the community of neighbors and the journalists who expressed their opinion in the Ballon d’Or. In the background, the particular Brexit of a club determined to abandon the institutional presence that has characterized it.
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