Perez’s inept regime turns managers off imploding Real

Faced with a limited transfer budget, large debts and a powerful dressing room, some big names soon grew cold on the top job at ‘the biggest club in the world’

First, in the summer, it was Mauricio Pochettino and Massimiliano Allegri, then Julian Nagelsmann and more recently it has been Antonio Conte, which prompts the question: could Real Madrid really afford to be turned down by Roberto Martinez as well?

Something seems to make the biggest managerial reputations in European football pause for thought when offered the top job at what we are habitually told is the biggest club in the world. One wonders whether Florentino Perez’s office has yet contacted the League Managers’ Association for their list of unattached A-license holders, but if the vacancy is not filled soon it might be worth Sam Allardyce updating his bespoke Powerpoint presentation on relegation six-pointers.

What is it they do not like about the self-styled biggest club in the world and its cabinet of 13 Champions League trophies, and is it the same thing that Zinedine Zidane saw when he was given a glimpse of the post-cristiano Ronaldo future? For now Sergio Ramos’s comments on Conte have been held up as the clincher when it comes to why the latter has not been given the job, the Real Madrid captain fully embracing his role as unofficial head of HR at the club.

“I’ve always said: Respect is won, it’s not imposed,” he said when asked about Conte. “We have won everything with managers that you know, and in the end, the management of the dressing room is more important than the technical knowledge of a manager.” With respect to the four-times Champions League winner, that does sound like a job spec that primarily involves making sure the towels and pre-match snacks are in good order, before quietly closing the dressing room door behind oneself. Hard to tell whether it reflects worse on Ramos or Zidane.

Either way, it does not really get to the heart of it. Real Madrid are closer to the relegation places than they are to the leaders – and deadly rivals – Barcelona and the club literally do not have a business plan that budgets for missing out on the Champions League. While major English clubs write in a risk analysis that includes a meltdownstyle season such as Manchester United’s in 2013-14 or Chelsea’s in 2015-16, Madrid do their calculations based on reaching the Champions League quarter-finals as a bare minimum.

Julen Lopetegui was appointed as the cheap option with a threeyear contract worth just €18 million (£16million), little enough that Madrid and Perez were prepared to take the condemnation of the Spanish football federation at their last-minute World Cup deal. This summer, the club had very small margins to play with.

No cash reserves for players in the summer, a stadium project years behind scale, borrowings to pay their massive wage bill. Ronaldo’s sale delivered them into profit, as Alvaro Morata and Danilo’s sales had the summer before, but only if they conserved resources.

The cattiness of Madrid’s severance statement with their manager of 138 days made it tempting to conclude that the one thing Lopetegui did manage to organise in his short time at the club was a watertight compensation package. Even with a squad boasting eight Ballon d’or-nominated players he could not be hard to beat – five defeats in normal time in all competitions bear testament to that – but it does sound like he was hard to sack.

The ways in which Perez has squandered money at the club he runs like his own personal fiefdom are hard to list. There have been cumulative losses of €234 million on the basketball operation alone since 2009, when Perez returned for his second spell as president. The delays in the stadium continue to cost the club the projected revenue they said themselves could be earned when the plans were first announced. The latest accounts reveal that even Real Madrid TV loses €30 million annually.

The problem is that the finances are finally starting to bite at front of shop. The club is not the all-powerful organisation it became in the first decade of the millennium, which is partly because of the way in which the game and ownership has changed across Europe but is mostly to do with the way in which Madrid has been run.

Perez infamously introduced a bank bond requirement of any Madrid presidential candidate that effectively meant that none but himself could stand. Nevertheless, that did not mean that he felt it necessary to turn up in person this week to explain the