Florentino Pérez and the nerves in the Bernabéu box

It is better to remain silent and appear foolish than to speak and remove all doubt. For many years, Florentino Pérez has cultivated his image as a powerful man by managing his silences and using spokespeople of all kinds to deliver his messages. This formula has served him well in forging an image of a person who pulls the strings from the shadows to achieve his aims and bend wills. But on Tuesday, he broke his silence, and in just one hour of a press conference, he displayed arrogance, haughtiness, and irritation because things are not going his way.The president of Real Madrid presented himself to the media as a victim of journalists, a victim of a media conspiracy, a victim of a hostile environment that, according to him, is obsessed with harming his club and his personal image. But this idea of a defenseless man does not quite fit with reality, because he holds large shares of economic, media, and institutional power. He has been president of Real Madrid for twenty-six years, since July 18, 2000, ruling the white club with an iron fist, and now aspires to exceed thirty years in office if he wins the elections he has called. At the same time, he controls an international business conglomerate that invoices tens of billions and employs 170,000 workers. All this has allowed him to weave a network of complicities at all levels, which until today seemed indestructible.No matter how much some try to rewrite history, Real Madrid has historically been the team of the regime. Its proximity to political, economic, and media power has been structural and has yielded evident benefits for decades. The collusion with the State's elites has never been hidden; on the contrary, it has been displayed with absolute naturalness. Also, the large real estate operations that have allowed the club to obtain extraordinary resources, a kind of economic doping that has facilitated sustaining pharaonic sporting projects and always competing with an advantage over many rivals.Florentino Pérez represents this way of understanding football: multimillion-dollar signings, permanent grandiloquence, and a triumphalist narrative built with a deep pocket. When things are going well, he appears as the great visionary. But when the ball stops going in, the project never fails. There are always external enemies ready to conspire against Madrid. And this time the culprits are the journalists.The season that is now ending has been sportingly devastating for the white club, and the final touch has been a defeat at the Camp Nou that has given the League to Barça. It is already known that in football, when the ball doesn't go in, everything that seemed solid is questioned. And when the triumphant narrative cracks, then everything is urgency and the worst version of a leader accustomed to controlling everything emerges.Florentino Pérez offered an exhibition of resentment and arrogance unbecoming of someone with his experience. In just one hour, he managed to portray himself as a leader deeply irritated by any dissenting voice. He pointed out people by name and surname, and fed fake news about supposed refereeing privileges for Barça. And all seasoned, as usually happens, with a paternalistic and sexist tone that some still confuse with friendliness.Powerful people tend to be distrustful, surely as a defense mechanism to protect themselves from self-interested and opportunistic individuals. They talk to many people, but trust no one. Or even worse: they only listen to those who tell them exactly what they want to hear, and those who dare to contradict them, even if they do so honestly, end up marginalized. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine that there was no one minimally sensible in Florentino's circle who was capable of advising him not to appear before the media with that tone. Resentment weighed more than intelligence, and the result has been a genuine communication disaster that cannot be disguised even by the court of jesters who, like Josep Pedrerol, have come to the rescue to cover up their master's shame.The Madrid of power has been in shock for a few days. The detonator is an undeniable sporting crisis of a team without soul or project, but in the end, everything has been talked about except football. When such a powerful club dedicates more energy to chasing media phantoms than to analyzing its sporting errors, it means something profound is cracking. And that is probably what most worries those in the Bernabéu box today. Not so much having lost titles as having started to lose control of the narrative.