Money talks. Especially at Real Madrid. If you can't personally guarantee €187 million and boast 20 years of club membership, there's no way to take over the club, which has allowed its president Florentino Pérez to rule for nearly two decades.
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.
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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
To stand for election at Real Madrid, you have to have been a member for at least 20 years without interruption. Florentino has been a member for 65. But that is not the real wall. The real wall is the 187 million euros.
Real Madrid's club's statutes require a guarantee equivalent to 15% of the annual budget, and the club's budget for this year is around €1,248 million. That guarantee has to be from a candidate's own assets, with no investors behind it, no funds, no capitalist partners.
The money has to be deposited with a notary's office, free of any ties.
There is no room for creative structures or for calling a rich friend at the last minute. When Florentino ran for the first time in 2000, he had to deposit €120 million to compete against Lorenzo Sanz. He did it without complaint and won. Last week he recalled that moment with a rather deliberate pointedness: "I didn't ask for more time. I ran and I won." It was a clear dig at his leadership rival Enrique Riquelme, though without naming him.
Beyond the endorsement and years of membership, any candidacy bid for the presidency has to be backed up by between 10 and 20 members, each with their own seniority requirements: 15 years for the vice-presidents, 10 for the rest of the board. Building such a team, with such deep roots in the club, takes years of work. It is not something that is improvised in two weeks.
Who are the men who move in the shadows?
Enrique Riquelme is 37 years old, is from Cox (Alicante) and presides over a renewable energy company that skyrocketed after buying the assets of the former Abengoa in 2023. He has been a member of Madrid since he was a child, because his father was a director during the presidency of Ramón Calderón, Florentino's great political rival at the time.
In theory, he could meet the economic and seniority requirements. According to reports, he asked for more time to organise his presidential bid, and Pérez took advantage of this to draw blood in public.
Pérez accused him of being behind media campaigns against the club, of moving "in the shadows", of talking "with the electricity companies". And he finished off with a comment about his "Mexican accent" that generated quite a lot of noise, given that Riquelme is from Alicante, although he has spent a lot of time between Mexico and South America on business.
The "electricals" is not an innocent detail. Alongside Riquelme appears the name of David Mesonero, Iberdrola's Director of Corporate Development and son-in-law of Ignacio Sánchez Galán, the electricity company's chairman. Iberdrola and ACS, Florentino's construction company, have been locked in a war of interests in the Spanish energy sector for years. That the Madrid president's potential rivals have such a link to his main business antagonist is the kind of coincidence that Florentino does not overlook, and does not fail to point out.
The Real-ity Pérez wants to forget
Since Madrid lifted the Champions League at Wembley in June 2024, the club have gone two seasons without winning a top-level silverware. This has not happened since 2006, although this year has been particularly tough. The season that has just ended was particularly difficult: Barcelona won the domestic league title with 94 points, 11 more than Madrid, and there is still a game to play.
The problem was not a lack of valuable talent. According to the website Transfermarkt, Real Madrid's squad is worth €1.36 billion euros, the most expensively assembled team in the world. Even so, they won nothing. Neither Carlo Ancelotti, nor Xabi Alonso, nor Álvaro Arbeloa managed to find a successful spark to ignite the team.
Now, former coach Portugal's Jose Mourinho has now reportedly agreed a 2-year deal to take back the reins, some 13-years after his previous explosive tenure, although his official signing will not be announced until after the election period.
Alonso arrived in the summer of 2025 with a mandate to introduce a more rigorous game and was sacked on 12 January 2026, hours after losing the Spanish Super Cup final 3-2 to Real's biggest rivals Barçelona. He was replaced by Arbeloa, who before joining the first team coached Real Madrid Castilla, the reserve team. The decision raised more questions than it answered, and the months that followed did not dispel them.
Locker room crisis: Mbappé, Valverde and Tchouaméni
For many it seems Kylian Mbappé, the club's historic signing, is at the centre of all that's gone wrong with 'Los Blancos' or 'The Whites'.
A recent online petition called 'Mbappé Out' spread like wildfire on social media, after initially aiming for 200,000 responses. It reportedly amassed a staggering 30 million signatories within three days, but the reliability of the poll remains unclear, despite Real's worldwide 600 million fan base.
What is much harder to deny is Mbappé's alleged clash with a member of the coaching staff during a training session, or his angry reaction to being flagged offside by an assistant referee.
Injury meant he wasn't available for the'Clasico' last week in which Barcelona clinched the title.His support for the team was a "Hala Madrid" message on Instagram posted when the score was already 2-0. Some fans were also incensed by Mbappé being absent while on a romantic holiday break with his actress girlfriend Ester Exposito while he was recovering from his injury.
But Mbappé is not the only scapegoat or sign of a problem. Earlier this month, Real Madrid confirmed that Federico Valverde and Aurélien Tchouaméni were fined €500,000 each after coming to blows in training. Valverde ended up in hospital with a traumatic brain injury and stitches after apparently hitting his head on a table.
Journalist Marcos Benito has described the atmosphere in Valdebebas as decidedly frosty. Nobody talks, nobody jokes, absolute silence, like automatons who go to the pitch to train without generating any kind of normal coexistence.
These events explain why Pérez called the historic press conference and the elections, with the dressing room rift out in the open, the league title lost and an increasingly angry fan base who've not had anything to celebrate for two years.
Pérez, the undisputed champion for 17 years
When Pérez returned to the presidency in June 2009, after three years away, there were no elections. He was proclaimed directly as the only candidate. Since then, that has been repeated. In 2013, in 2017, in 2021: single candidate, direct proclamation, no ballot box.
In any other context this could well be described as a lack of internal democracy. In Madrid, it has a technical explanation: there is simply no one capable of fulfilling all the requirements at the same time and willing to try. Or, at least there wasn't until now.
Why is the noise of the last few weeks different from other times? Two seasons without titles weigh heavily. The management of Mbappé, signed with great fanfare and with a performance far below expectations, has generated real wear and tear among supporters. And for the first time in a long time, there are concrete names on the move, with money behind them and with the years of membership in order.
Florentino knows this and that's why he didn't wait to be pushed. He called the meeting, he set the tempo, he went to the press conference before the narrative got out of hand. "Whoever wants to present themselves, let them present themselves," he said, with the tone of someone who offers something convinced that no one is going to take it.
He has been a member of Madrid for 65 years and according to Forbes has a fortune estimated at 3.1 billion euros. He has won more European Cups than Santiago Bernabéu. And he presides over a club whose electoral system, as it is designed, makes tenure the natural state of affairs.
If anyone wants to take his place, they have to be able to afford the ticket first.
The presidential application period is open until Saturday with candidates expected to be be announced on 24 May. The electoral board then has two weeks to call the contest.