Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez calls for elections in bizarre rant

“Good afternoon, I regret to inform you that I’m not going to resign.” In a hot, packed press room at Valdebebas before an audience hurriedly summoned to witness a news conference so bizarre that they could barely believe what they were seeing, Florentino Pérez sat at a desk with a phone that he kept looking at and some papers that he didn’t, and announced that he was calling presidential elections at Real Madrid. What he didn’t announce was a date, an electoral commission, the resignation that is required for polling to actually happen, or indeed any details at all.

There was nothing about Madrid’s on-field issues either, nothing about the coach, no mention of José Mourinho, no explanation for the season they have just suffered. “I’m not here to talk about sporting issues,” Pérez said. Instead, he was there to deliver a surreal, repetitive rant that lasted over an hour, way after his own staff had tried to bring it to a close. A room of people, including the directors in the front row and lined up against one wall, looked at each other: yes, this was actually happening. Pérez went on and on, and on, the incoherent ramblings of a 79-year-old man who insisted “my health is perfect”.

“I’m enjoying this,” he said but it really was time to go, time to be taken home. That’s enough now. The laughs were of the uncomfortable type, more at him than with him: this was the first time he had faced the press since the day Zinedine Zidane “totally unexpectedly” walked out on him. Only facing makes it sound like he was there to be interrogated; this was more facing down. Questions weren’t answered, they were cues to say the same thing, an opportunity to introduce another newspaper or radio station that couldn’t be trusted.

That day, in 2018, he had looked sad; this time it was at turns almost funny yet really not funny at all, ­accusatory and threatening, demanding that the enemies conspiring against him come out of the shadows and stand so that he can defeat them, like something straight out of the falling emperor’s handbook. Enemies everywhere, paranoia too. “They’re going to have to shoot me, because I have the support of all Madrid’s members,” Pérez said. “I’m going to finish the bad people.”

Whoever they are. Whoever they are, they weren’t identified or informed what they have to do to stand, just challenged to come out and run. Which is made difficult by design. Madrid’s statutes mean you need to be a Spaniard with 20 years’ membership and €187m. Pérez “stood” alone in 2025, 2021, 2017, 2013 and 2009, democracy looking a little less than democratic. Here he seemed to reference businessman Enrique Riquelme, but wouldn’t name him, instead referring to “that man talking to the big electric companies with a South American accent”.

There were more enemies at the gates, and within them, a hint at the court politics that go on around him. “Leave the internal enemies to me,” he said. As for the external ones, there are the ultras too.