After winning his thirty-fifth league title, the real Madrid He worked a miracle at the Santiago Bernabéu and got into the Champions League final, scheduled for next May 28 in Paris against Liverpool. The team led by Carlos Ancelotti thus certifies a spectacular season, in which they have also been proclaimed champions of the Spanish Super Cup.
But, pending what happens in Paris, it is important reflect on the economic background of the qualifiers that Real Madrid has played to reach the final. And it is that no one escapes that, in the round of 16, quarter and semifinal qualifiers, the three teams that the meringues have knocked down have a large monetary endowment that is explained, plain and simple, by the entry of Russian oligarchs and petrodictatorships Arabs in the world of British football.
Take the case of Manchester City. Until the year 2007-2008, it was a most mediocre team, which walked without pain or glory through the British soccer fields, finishing off the seasons in the middle of the table. Everything changes with the entry into the club of the Abu Dhabi dictatorship, more specifically of the Jeque Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyanthrough its ADUG investment vehicle.
The “dirty money” of the Arab petro-dictatorship has poured in ever since, financing contracts worth €2,145 million between the 2008-2009 and 2021-2022 seasons. On average, the Blues spend 153 million a year to strengthen their squad and, between 2020 and 2022 alone, they have spent 306 million on new hires.
In net terms, the difference between purchases and sales amounts to -1,437.55 million euros. A full-fledged financial “doping” that is only sustained by the economic influence that favors the presence of Abu Dhabi in the ownership of the team. And, despite such an outlay, the goal of achieving a Champions League has once again escaped from the hands of Manchester City.
By comparison, if we review the same period (from the 2008-2009 to the 2021-2022 season), we can see that Real Madrid has invested a clearly lower sum in the transfer market than the British team has assumed, until point that the differential balance between purchases and sales is three times lower (-457.7 million euros) and the average disbursement per season is 65% lower (109.6 million per year). In factFrom 2020 to 2022, Real Madrid spent 31 million euros on signing new players, ten times less than Manchester City during the same period.
One of the keys to this good performance has been the way in which the Whites’ president, Florentino Pérez, has been handling his youngest talents. And it is that, in recent years, the market value of merengue youth squads has risen, on average, by 66%thus complementing a squad in which there is no lack of long-distance stars such as Luka Modric, Karim Benzemá or Toni Kroos, as well as “bargains” such as Camavinga, who is already shining at 19 years old and cost just over 30 million, or David Alaba, who arrived with the letter of freedom under his arm and did not involve a penny of spending.
If the situation of Manchester City is aberrant, the case of the Paris Saint Germain. The French club is in the hands of the sovereign fund of the Arab petrodictatorship of Qatar. Said investment vehicle, controlled by the Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hada Al Thani, delegated the management of the team to the figure of Nasser Al-Khelaifi, current boss of the Parisian team.
Well, as Libre Mercado explained, the net balance between signings and sales of players in the management period of the Arab petro-dictatorship shows a negative balance of -939 million euros. This financial “doping” is so outrageous that PSG have come to reject an offer of 200 million for Kylian Mbappé, despite the fact that the crack The Frenchman will be able to go to the team of his choice for free starting in the summer of 2022, following the end of his contract.
But the “dirty money” that inflates the performance of these teams not only flows from the Middle East, but also pours in from Russia. A) Yes, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich has “injected” 1,792 million euros at English Chelsea, another team that manages resources well above its historical background as a club, through different traps. It is important to emphasize that Abramovich is directly linked to the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin, which is why he has fled the British Isles and has been sanctioned by the European authorities.
All of this highlights the performance of Real Madrid, but also underlines the important challenges facing European football, plunged into a total fracture of its common market due to the permissiveness of a UEFA that, far from correcting the continuous violations of fair play financial”, continues to allow this type of bad practice to happen again and again.
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