Duality was a cornerstone of late- Victorian literature’s most enduring characters.
The same yet different, each was inexorably defined by, and drawn to, the other. There was mistrust, hatred, but also a fascination with their opposite. Holmes vs Moriarty; Jekyll vs Hyde; Dracula vs Van Helsing; Dorian Gray vs his portrait – the more that these conflicted souls understood about their enemy, the more they learned about themselves.
Real Madrid and Barcelona were always destined to hate one another. They were born just a few years after those duality tales, but the teams of the establishment and of militant separatists could never be friends – not with such philosophical, political and geographical differences, amid a brutal Spanish Civil War and right- wing dictatorship from 1936 to 1975. Yet that shared antipathy tied them together.
Going into the 2000s, El Clasico had already been Spain’s biggest football match for over half a century. By the decade’s end, however, in which they shared seven La Liga titles and four European Cups, it had exploded into the biggest game on the planet. Spanish football’s behemoths had made their league the world’s hottest competition and turned themselves into the most glamorous destinations for top talent. So: why the sudden interest?
Simple. On July 24, 2000, Luis Figo left Barça and joined Real Madrid. Nothing would be the same again.
Just ask that pig.
“OF THE 10 BEST PLA YERS IN THE WORLD, WE’VE GOT FIVE”
In 1998, Real Madrid had awoken from their slumber – but something within gnawed away. The club which had defined itself by
European Cup glory, ever since winning the competition’s first five tournaments in the late 1950s, had finally ended a 32- year wait for – the seventh – but Barcelona were just… sexier.
During the 1999- 00 campaign, Los Blancos were well placed in the Champions League, sure, but they had finished 11 points behind Barcelona in the previous La Liga season and entered the new millennium in mid- table.
couldn’t take it. Florentino Perez decided to run for the office of Real Madrid president. A short, puffy- faced civil engineer, he was the president of ACS: Spain’s third- largest construction company, with a € 4 billion turnover. What Perez lacked in presence, he more than made up for in ideas or – the political and financial connections that greased wheels. He counted Jose Maria Aznar, the Spanish Prime Minister, as both a colleague and a friend.
By the time Perez submitted his candidacy on June 30, it would be a one- on- one race between the upstart and Lorenzo Sanz, who had just delivered two European Cups in three seasons. No one gave the engineer a prayer. Yet Perez had his finger on the pulse of
How? Because he asked them. While preparing his bid, Perez commissioned a questionnaire which asked the club’s fans to name the player they wanted Real Madrid to buy above all others.
Luis Figo was the overwhelming winner. The winger would later lift that year’s Ballon d’or, yet Barcelona were playing hardball over a new contract and he was annoyed by the impasse. The release clause stood at £ 38m: a potential world- record fee, but affordable. Just.
Perez offered a non- returnable £ 1.6m to Figo’s agent, Jose Veiga, for his client to sign
Figo on that fateful night of the pig’s head – and taking a corner, even
One angry Culé gets his point ( and name) across a document saying that he would join Real Madrid if Perez won the election. Easy money, they thought – after all, Perez had absolutely no chance of winning.
Perez announced his mini- deal on July 6, the day his presidential rival gave away his daughter to Real Madrid’s full- back Michel Salgado. “Maybe he’ll announce he’s signed Claudia Schiffer next,” sneered a blasé Sanz at the wedding.
Figo denied everything – both in public and privately, to team- mates Pep Guardiola and Luis Enrique. Ten days later, Perez triumphed by a landslide. To cancel the deal, incoming Barcelona president Joan Gaspart would have to pay Real Madrid a £ 19m penalty clause, effectively to keep his own player. A furious Gaspart refused; Figo himself felt let down by
the club. “They thought I was bluffing,” he told
later. “Maybe it wasn’t very, very clear, because it didn’t depend only on me.”
On July 24, a barely smiling Figo was unveiled at the Bernabeu. A club insider says Gaspart “went into shock... he couldn’t think rationally. He was destroyed by Madrid.”
Attention turned to October’s first Clasico of the season, in Barcelona. Stirred by a febrile Catalan press, the Camp Nou atmosphere was different: visceral, unapologetic hatred. There were angry banners everywhere. ‘ Mercenary’. ‘ Judas’. ‘ Scum’. Thousands of fake bank notes emblazoned with Figo’s face were printed and thrown onto the pitch. He was visibly shocked and refused to take corners, though that didn’t stop the maelstrom of coins, lighters, whisky bottles and golf balls being chucked his way.
Unsurprisingly, Figo played dreadfully. With a pumped- up Carles Puyol his shadow for 90 minutes, Real Madrid lost 2- 0.
“Physically and mentally, it is impossible to ignore 75,000 people shouting against you,” Figo later told “I was worried that some madman might lose his head.”
Two years later, a pig did. Water under the bridge? No chance. A – a roasted suckling pig’s head – thrown onto the Camp Nou turf became El Clasico’s defining image. The match – a 0- 0 draw – was suspended for 16 minutes, though Barça escaped sanction, their directors accusing Madrid photographers of a setup: “We don’t even eat it in Catalonia.” The world was captivated.
Perez had his superstar, but most of all, he had his reaction – and that was priceless.
The notoriety that the Figo transfer gave to Perez was a drug he couldn’t quit. There was, however, a major stumbling block: the club were virtually bankrupt and £ 185m in debt.
“Real Madrid,” said Perez, three months after being elected, “is seriously ill.”
The cure was ingenious and intrinsically Perez. He sold La Ciudad Deportiva – the club’s training ground on the northern tip of the city centre, an area of prime real estate – to the Madrid local authority for £ 298m, who raised the cash mainly through taxes paid by every
Atletico and Rayo Vallecano fans included. Perez’s swept everything through with speed. For most, it would take two or three years of Spanish red tape. Perez did the deal in 24 hours.
To rebuild the training ground, Perez bought land by Barajas airport for a fraction of what he’d received. He had wiped out Real Madrid’s debts at a stroke. Crucially, he had money left over. So, in the summer of 2001 he broke the world transfer record again to sign Zinedine Zidane for £ 46m. The following year he bought the Brazilian Ronaldo. Real Madrid already had Figo, Raul and Roberto Carlos. “Of the 10 best players in the world,” said club captain Fernando Hierro, “we’ve got five.” He wasn’t exaggerating. David Beckham arrived in 2003.
“Nothing is more profitable than recruiting a superstar,” said Perez, citing Ronaldo as the only player who could score 25 goals a season and “pay for himself”.
In 1999- 00, not one Bernabeu fixture had sold out. In 2000- 01, 18 of 19 did. The season after that, they all did. It’s hard to overstate the effect Los Galacticos had on Spanish football.
Perez encouraged his superstars to sign over their image rights to the club. “If one of our players does an advert for custard, he might earn € 120,000,” the club president reasoned. “If he filmed the same advert in a Real Madrid shirt, he would make 10 times that.”