Real Madrid and their newly elected President Florentino Perez are once again making a mockery out of the "World game" by attempting to buy themselves glory.
Real under Perez's leadership did the same thing a few years ago with the now famous "Galacticos" policy. Perez went shopping and bought amongst many others, Figo, Zidane, Beckham and Owen at ridiculous fees to bring back the glory days to Madrid. They won the Premiera League a few times and a CL trophy (or perhaps two depending on how the time period of his presidency is looked at.....and then they started to believe Real had actually organically made it all happen and guess what happened next?
They started to fade away after the 2002 CL win, Perez lost his position, and they have been rather ordinary every since, blaming coach after coach for their failure to plan for the future and develop youngsters through the ranks.
Now Perez has once again been elected with the promise to "buy" Real's way back into the history books at any cost and in a totally shameless fashion. And as the nature of Club Presidency in Spain dictates, Perez has to be flashier and more outrageous this time. So, he's paid more than 200m Euros for Ronaldo and Kaka, both of whom will reportedly earn more than 300 thousand euros a week after tax.
In doing so, Perez hopes to get enough time to "buy" a few trophies for Real, before his ego once again clashes with the Board's collective egos, the coach gets blamed, and Ronaldo starts throwing his usual narcissistic tantrums!
You might challenge me by asking the same question about other rich European clubs. Chelsea and their appearing overnight "funny Money divided between so few Putin supporters" Russian money aside, who have as yet failed to buy their European glory (thanks to John Terry slipping on the ball in last year's CL Final), most other big European clubs such as AC Milan, Barcelona, Manchester United, Liverpool, Juventus and Bayern all try to buy the best players in their desperate attempts to get their hands on the CL trophy.
That is a fair comment. However, none go crazy like Perez and Real do, and all try their hands on developing some of their young talent as well. Take Barcelona and its Youth Academy or Manchester United and Sir Alex for instance. Love him or loath him(and I belong to the later group) Sir Alex has an uncanny ability to nurture young talent into his first team (endless list of Neville brothers, Beckham, Giggs, Ronaldo, Butt etc) as well as letting restless players leave. Even the self serving, self promoting Berlusconi at AC Milan never behaved as shamelessly as Perez is at Real.
At the end of it all, Perez is simply taking the Beautiful game further and further towards disaster whilst trying to buy his way into glory of the history books.
In years to come, rest assured Real fans, and football fans worldwide will remember the expensive players who won Real the trophies. But Perez will be judged as one of the architects of "prostituting the passion of the beautiful game in order to buy himself glory"
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