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Real Madrid has so far had a poor start to the season, having slipped to 9th place on the LaLiga table. Los Blancos have enjoyed so much success in the last few years that failure is no longer accepted at the Bernabeu.
Gone are the days when clubs like Olympique Lyon eliminated Real Madrid from the Champions League. These days, the Spanish giants are the ones beating every team in Europe over and over. Having won the Champions League three times in a row, it was expected that the club would continue the dominance this season.
However, things have quickly fallen apart, with the Madrid team currently looking like a pale shadow of the one which conquered Europe just six months ago. Of course, there are certain factors that have led to this massive slump.
The departures of manager Zinedine Zidane and all-time top scorer Cristiano Ronaldo has obviously hit the club very hard, and they are yet to recover from the blow. But things could have panned out in a better way had club president Florentino Perez played his cards well.
The Madrid president has made so many woeful decisions in the past few months, and it is as a result of those decisions the club is currently struggling. Below are three reasons why Perez is Madrid’s biggest problem at the moment.
#3 Letting Ronaldo and Zidane leave
One of the biggest blunders Florentino Perez has made at Real Madrid is allowing both Zinedine Zidane and Cristiano Ronaldo leave the club at the same time. These were two individuals who had the winning mentality in their DNAs.
Although Zidane was handed the job as a novice, he grew on the job and moulded the team into a side capable of winning the UEFA Champions League back-to-back. There is no doubt that the void left by the Frenchman has still not been filled, with his successor Julen Lopetegui getting fired earlier this week.
While Zidane’s departure brought a huge deficit in the technical area, Ronaldo’s denied the club of goals on the pitch. This is a man who averages 40 goals per season at least, yet Perez’s intransigence pushed him out of the Bernabeu.
Indeed there are also reports the Real Madrid president did very little to keep Zidane at the helm. Had he handled the issue with the seriousness it deserved, Madrid would definitely not have found themselves in this current mess.
#2 His ego is letting the club down
In an era where club presidents and directors do everything in their power to ensure that players give their best, Florentino Perez appears to be more bent on satisfying his ego. In the past he may have gotten away with it, but this time there is no escape route.
This is a man who has never treated club legends well. It happened with Raul Gonzales, Iker Casillas, Xabi Alonso, Pepe, and now Cristiano Ronaldo. It appears that he is a complete novice to the term “player power”. His obsession to prove to the players that he is the boss is what has landed Madrid in its current situation.
Perez has achieved a lot for Madrid in his two stints as the club's president, but his ego risks undoing everything at the moment.
Elite clubs are run on stability, and a willingness to make players feel comfortable, but once these things are absent, it gets to a time when no player would be willing to play with passion for the club. Perez’s ego is the type that lets clubs down, and currently he has seriously let Madrid down.
#1 He runs the club in an archaic way
Again, there is no doubt that Florentino Perez has played a huge role in Real Madrid’s resurgence as a European superpower. However, certain decisions he has made in recent times suggest his ways of managing the club are fast becoming archaic.
For instance, he is very much aware that the Real Madrid team is aging, yet he decided not to be active during the transfer market. Add that to the fact that there was no adequate replacement for a goal machine like Cristiano Ronaldo, and it becomes difficult to understand what ambitions Perez has for the club this season.
In fact, rather than sign a proven striker, he bought an untested Mariano Diaz and handed him Ronaldo’s number 7 jersey (that was his ego at play again, but the club should always come first before any personal scores). And then typical of him, he signed Thibaut Courtois, when it was evident that the goalkeeping department was the least worry of the club.
All these decisions have affected Real Madrid negatively, and that is as a result of the archaic way Perez is handling matters.
