For some time now, Spanish politics has been immersed in a permanent electoral campaign, due to the calling of elections at the state, autonomous community, or municipal level. On the other hand, they cannot say the same for the world of football and, in particular, for Real Madrid. Twenty years later, the Whites are holding elections this Sunday and the campaign has suggested that, whatever the result, it will inevitably mean a mutation of the club: Florentino Pérez, president since 2009, has opened Pandora's box of ownership by rolling out the red carpet for a private investor. Meanwhile, Enrique Riquelme, his first opponent in history, has emerged as a critique of the model of recent years, promising a sporting structure that is "serious, modern, and profoundly madridista" and capable, he says, of leaving behind the low points the white team is going through. He has also promised a way of governing that is "transparent" and "more democratic." During the campaign, there has, of course, been talk of players and coaches. The candidates have promised the signing of great players, but depending on what happens, Madrid will experience very profound changes off the field.

Informatively, the interest in Real Madrid's elections is unquestionable, but the level of the two presidential candidates demonstrates that the type of leadership in the world of football – there and here – is very low. They are privileged gentlemen with an outsized ego who confuse the part with the whole. In short, toxic masculinities with different styles, but with the same essence. For now, the one who has already won the white elections by sheer patheticness is a Florentino Pérez who has become an erratic being who rambles on repeating battles from 25 years ago, whatever the format: press conference or a massage-interview with friends like Iker Jiménez. It's easy to imagine a maid from an ex-colony cutting the hake into very small pieces so as not to choke. The opponent, however, is no anti-dandruff shampoo: Enrique Riquelme is the same old song, but further from the nursing home.

Thursday night, Florentino Pérez went to campaign for the Real Madrid presidency elections on Horizonte, the far-right television nest at Mediaset. That Iker Jiménez, an expert in aliens and psychophony, interviewed him is the real paranormal phenomenon of journalism. Obviously, it was an act of revenge against Atresmedia for having invited his opponent, Enrique Riquelme, to El hormiguero the night before. But it was a bad idea to choose a program that was broadcast while the Spanish national team was playing. Part of the electorate must have been watching La 1 at that time.

If Enrique Riquelme defeats Florentino Pérez at the polls on Sunday, Erling Haaland will be a Real Madrid player. This is the announcement made by the candidate in the white club's elections. Riquelme presented it with a Real Madrid jersey showing the name of the Norwegian star from Manchester City and the number nine, accompanied by a notarized document in which he commits not to sell any percentage of the club if he becomes president. "I have signed a personal notarized guarantee where if I fail to keep any of my promises, I will pay 100% of all fees for Real Madrid's 100,000 members next season," he confessed.

The pathetic press conference in which Florentino Pérez announced that he was calling elections ended with a threat. “They will have to throw me out with bullets,” he said. The weapons he has used so that there were no elections have not been insignificant and mainly demonstrate how much Enrique Riquelme worries him. From the surprise call for five working days to gather the super-millionaire guarantee –of the ten calendar days, five were holidays– to the suspicious refusal of BBVA and Santander to provide the candidate with the guarantee. The ambush has been perfectly calculated, even though Florentino's image was damaged after showing himself to be repetitive, obsessive, incoherent, and paranoid with the media.

Jan and Flo are very different, but they have shared an apartment for years. Taking advantage of a few days of vacation, they have gone to Mallorca. The first night they went out to dinner and, afterwards, to party. Flo takes care of himself, and after having another glass of Ribera del Duero, he preferred to go back to the apartment. On the other hand, Jan, more of a bon vivant, first indulged in two good plates of macaroni, then had gin and tonics, and at the club, he drank straight from a Moët magnum that was circulating on the dance floor while he danced, sang, and hugged friends he had met that very morning. It was already daylight when he went to bed, tired but happy. When he woke up, Flo had already been doing his yoga exercises for a while, had eaten yogurt with cereal for breakfast, and was now answering some emails. Jan loves sobrassada and ensaïmadas, and there is nothing better than this combination to start the day if you are on vacation in Mallorca. Then he put on his swimsuit and dived into the pool, splashing Flo, who at that moment was on his third lap. Jan prefers the butterfly style. Flo protects himself from the sun with a hat under the umbrella. Jan, on the water mattress, closes his eyes while feeling the sun warm and tan him.

Real Madrid will have elections. Enrique Riquelme officially presented his candidacy to preside over the club this Saturday afternoon, on the last day set by the deadlines, and on Sunday the electoral board decided to validate it. Therefore, he will have to call the members to the polls, 20 years later. The president of the energy company Cox assured that he presents an "exciting and serious" project, which "is not against anyone" but in favor of the entity and asked the members "not to be afraid".

The refusal of the Spanish big banks to back Enrique Riquelme's candidacy for the presidency of Real Madrid has pushed the businessman to knock on the doors of foreign financial institutions, and with only a few hours left before the deadline to present a project with substance expires – he has until this Saturday, May 23, at midnight – negotiations remain open. This is the case of Andbank España – the Spanish subsidiary of the Andorran bank Andbank –, with whom Riquelme was finalizing a guarantee this Friday afternoon, according to financial sources speaking to ARA. However, the businessman has also looked across the Atlantic and has knocked on the door of Scotiabank (Canada), as reported by Expansión. This firm is not unknown to Riquelme, as it was part of the banks that financed the purchase by Cox, the energy company he chairs, of the subsidiary that Iberdrola had in Mexico.

Enrique Riquelme Vives (Coix, Alicante, 1989) is finally taking a step forward and will battle to preside over Real Madrid, as he communicated this Thursday afternoon to the Electoral Board of Real Madrid. The businessman has managed to secure a list of names to contest the presidency against Florentino Pérez, who after 26 years presiding over the club, and for the first time, will have an opponent in the white club's elections, the first since those in 2006, which Ramón Calderón won.

The time for aspirants to preside over Real Madrid to present a candidacy is running out. For now, only the Valencian Enrique Riquelme, president of the energy company Cox, is the one who has raised his hand to take the step, although this Monday he was still "working on it". He has until this Saturday, May 23. He needs 187 million euros of his own patrimonial guarantee (15% of Real Madrid's budget) and to have been a member of the white club for at least 20 years. Requirements that would be in order, according to Riquelme himself has revealed.

It was a surprise: the day Florentino exposed himself. A delirium only explainable by the loss of touch with reality that, sooner or later, happens to all of us and which, in his case, has an impact due to who he is and the roles he has played: an all-powerful and untouchable businessman who has run Real Madrid as if it were his own home without his management being questioned. His latest performance can only be understood by unconsciousness, by a significant loss of faculties. Such an excessive outburst that revealed the worst he carries in his backpack: excessive sexism, blatant arrogance, and a clear loss of touch with reality. He, all by himself, has been left out of play. A feeling aggravated later, when he said he had only received congratulations.

After the confirmation of a blank season, with the defeat in the classic against Barça at the Camp Nou, the players, the coach, and the president of Real Madrid had to answer to the fans. And the Bernabéu delivered its verdict. Well, partially, because Madrid's stadium had the lowest attendance of the season in the inconsequential duel against an Oviedo that is already relegated to the Second Division. It didn't help that it was San Isidro's festivities and the poor results of Álvaro Arbeloa's team. But the spectators responded with whistles, especially towards Kylian Mbappé, and also with banners directed at Florentino Pérez, who lately doesn't have a moment's peace.

Florentino Pérez's press conference on Tuesday was surprising, chaotic and, at times, grotesque. But the fact that the Real Madrid president, visibly nervous, had a sometimes disorganized speech and made off-topic, derogatory or sexist comments, does not mean he did not have some things clear. It was a campaign event, in which he launched the electoral machinery without prior planning and took the opportunity to disqualify the one who, for some time now, he knows is the only rival who can overshadow him.

A Japanese food company has announced that it is removing the color from the packaging of its products due to a shortage of the material used for ink in But because they say that a picture is worth a thousand words, it is very suggestive where black and white can lead us. Because this combination can be either very elegant or very mothballed, with that included smell of this chemical product that in the colorful world is already practically out of use. So let's forget the elegance of black and white and focus on that black and white that smells of a dingy past that refuses to leave. A good example is Florentino's press conference and the fact of addressing a journalist as "little girl

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.

Since the ultrarich have personally declared war on the rest of humanity, they have reinforced a communicative pattern of arrogance, which, without going any further, is shared by the president of the United States and the president of Real Madrid.

The teachers' protests continue, who this morning have again blocked roads and access to Barcelona. Tomorrow, finally, they will meet with the Government. The Department of Education says there is no room to improve salaries beyond 200 euros per month, but everything seems to indicate that the Government will indeed put more money on the table to improve the inclusive school service, the model that aims to guarantee education for all students regardless of their personal abilities, family origins, or social and economic conditions. Let's hope they succeed (it seems impossible for the conflict to be resolved in the first meeting) but Salvador Illa's Government would do well to show that it understands that it cannot pretend everything will be fine thanks to the magic of a government that doesn't want noise.

"Unusual", "grotesque", "disconcerting". These are some of the adjectives the media have chosen to define Florentino Pérez's press conference this Tuesday, a meeting full of reproaches with which he announced the call for elections for Real Madrid. The president of the white club and candidate for re-election shot against everyone and everything, and singled out media outlets and journalists by name and surname, whom he accused of waging war against him. Hours later, the first covers of newspapers and written and radio editorials reacting to his words were published.

Shortly after Tuesday lunchtime, many Madrid journalists received news of an impromptu press conference by Florentino Pérez. More than one thought it would be to dismiss Álvaro Arbeloa and others thought he might be considering stepping down, as he had done the first time he had gone two seasons without titles, in 2006. But within minutes, club sources were already informing them they were quite mistaken. Quite the opposite: Pérez would go on the offensive and many of those journalists would be publicly attacked. The white president will call elections to make it clear who is in charge, but the move could end up being a shot in the foot, as on this occasion there is indeed a member ready to confront him. Madridismo is living through key days.

The press conference called this afternoon by surprise by Florentino Pérez with the aim of announcing the call for elections at the club has led to a lamentable confrontation with the press that has revealed the true face of the madridista president. The entire intervention has been a forward flight that has distilled arrogance, haughtiness, sexism, and contempt for journalists and any shadow of opposition. It has been a communication catastrophe for the entity from which it will take many years to recover.