On 12 May, Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez called an emergency press conference. He had been in the eye of the storm for weeks: two seasons without titles, rumours of illness and and an increasingly angry and bitter fanbase.
Everyone expected he would announce his departure. Instead, came this: "I regret to tell you that I am not resigning". And then, almost as an afterthought, he announced that he was calling elections.
To say the move caught everyone by surprise is a severe understatement. At Real Madrid, the world's richest football club, calling elections and winning them have long been almost the same thing.
Pérez is 79 years old. He has been a member of the club since 1 October 1961 and is member number 1,484. He came to Madrid neither as president nor as a successful businessman, but as a 14-year-old boy who loved football. Since then he has not stopped being a member for a single year. This detail, which seems anecdotal, turns out to be one of the foundational pillars of his power.
The wall of 187 million
