Gotta love the new regime at Real Madrid trying to blackmail the club and its fans with threats that if they don't sign Cristiano Ronaldo, they'll be forced to honor an alleged "pre-contract agreement" arranged by former prez Ramon Calderon and the player's agent Jorge Mendes that says Ronaldo will be owed €30M as a penalty.We call B.S.
New president Florentino Perez and his VP henchman Fernando Tapias are blitzing the media with this story trying to gain support for the outlandish €90M deal Ronaldo reportedly would get from Madrid. "Either we pay €90M for the best player in the world, or we pay €30M for nothing." Wow.
Tapias told a Spanish radio station that the agreement exists and suggested that maybe FIFA take care of the issue by capping transfers at say, oh, €50M.
Real Madrid is at the head of the Silly Season class. The Independent reports they're going to sign Kaka for €56M-plus on Monday and perhaps Ronaldo soon thereafter. Madrid is in a headline-grabbing war with Barcelona, which won the Spanish League-Copa del Ray-Champions League treble a couple of weeks ago. Signing Kaka and Ronny may not put Madrid back on top in those three competitions, put it puts them on top of the Galacticos competition and on the back pages of the Spanish tabloids.
We wonder which is more important to Perez and Tapias? Perez told the Spanish media:
"People say that [Zinedine] Zidane was the most expensive signing but he turned out to be the cheapest in many ways. It was that type of signing that made us the club with the highest income in the world. When [David] Beckham came we went from earning €7m a year to €45m a year through our deals with our sponsors. We salvaged the situation of the club. If Cristiano Ronaldo comes, even though he is currently with Nike, he then puts on an Adidas shirt every week. There are certain players who are very profitable because they have spectacular commercial repercussions that earn the club money."Don't feel badly, however, for Madrid. Like the New York Yankees, the Spanish giants have a pretty steady flow of cash coming in. Again, courtesy of The Independent, Madrid gets £100M annually from a seven-year MediaPro deal (double what Manchester United earns from a similar deal); Spains tax laws tax foreign players at 23% while England tops 50%; banks in Spain give the club "unwritten privileges", e.g., low interest rates on loans; attendance is high, as is revenue from overseas trips and merchandise sales.
No comments:
Post a Comment