Real Madrid had their celebratory shirts ready as soon as they secured their place in the Champions League final. As the players ran toward each other, ecstatic about another heartbreaking, heartbreaking victory, staff members ran onto the field behind them, making sure each star was dressed correctly.
On the back of each shirt was the club’s latest approved slogan: Going for 15. By the 15th. The shorthand ran the risk of seeming arrogance: Real Madrid’s 15th Champions League title was still one victory away. However, no one seemed particularly concerned. The Champions League, in terms of the team that has won it twice as much as any other, largely belongs to Real Madrid.
That belief has put the Spanish club at the center of a power struggle whose interests include nothing less than control over the future of European football. It is a bitter fight between rich clubs and powerful administrators over who matters most, who should set the agenda and – perhaps most importantly – who should benefit from the billions of dollars in broadcast and sponsorship revenue that the biggest competitions generate each year. rich of the continent.
The clash pits two of the most powerful figures in world football: Real Madrid’s brash president Florentino Pérez, a representative of European football’s old guard, against the leader of the continent’s governing body, Aleksander Ceferin, who has wielded influence and threats to maintain their own version. of the status quo.
And it has put UEFA (European football’s governing body and the organization that actually runs the competition) in the increasingly uncomfortable position of regularly celebrating a club that represents a serious threat to its authority.
A win against Germany’s Borussia Dortmund on Saturday would mean Real Madrid have been crowned champions of UEFA’s top competition six times in the last decade. At the same time, it is entering the third year of a bitter legal fight, conducted largely through proxies, designed if not to destroy the Champions League, then to bring about the most radical changes in its history.
The precise state of that battle varies depending on the perspective of the combatants. Last week, a Spanish court issued a ruling that Real Madrid and its allies interpreted as a resounding endorsement of their attempts to launch a rival Super League: a successor to the Champions League that is owned and operated by the biggest clubs in the world. football, free of sponsorship. of UEFA.
“The era of monopoly is definitely over,” said Bernd Reichart, president of A22, the consultancy acting as the public face of the Pérez-backed Super League project.
UEFA’s interpretation of the situation was markedly different. “The court has not given the green light or approved projects such as the Super League,” he said in a statement. “In fact, the judge has stated that the Super League project has been abandoned for a long time and that she cannot be expected to rule on any abstract project.”
This has left both sides, and their powerful presidents, stuck in an unsatisfactory stalemate.
Privately, UEFA insists it does not view the current incarnation of Pérez’s Super League vision as any kind of threat. At the same time, it has never been able to deliver any decisive blow that could definitively put an end to the project.
The effect has been to make relations between UEFA and Real Madrid in general (and between Pérez and Ceferin, in particular) increasingly tense and increasingly personal: in a series of WhatsApp messages leaked online last week In the past, it was reported that Ceferin once described Pérez as an “idiot and racist.” He has not disputed the accuracy of the report by an online publication, The Objective.
The men would meet again on Friday for a regular dinner involving delegations from the finalists and the UEFA hierarchy. The last time they broke bread on such an occasion was in Paris in 2022, just a few months after the supernova that was the short, unhappy life of the Super League ended.
Back then, they navigated the pregame protocols required of them without incident. Nothing strange was discussed at the table, such as Pérez’s attempts to destroy the Champions League. And the night ended with a smile. Mr. Pérez introducing Mr. Ceferin with a model of Real Madrid’s renovated Santiago Bernabéu stadium.
The animosity, however, is never far from the surface and serves as a ample example of how fundamentally opposed their positions remain.
Ceferin sees UEFA as the ultimate guardian of European football, the pinnacle of its pyramid. For Pérez, the football hierarchy goes after the most powerful clubs, and one of them more than any other.
In 2021, when Real Madrid, along with A22 and 11 of Europe’s other elite teams, launched the Super League, the most jarring question was why, exactly, it wanted to bring about the end of the Champions League. After all, it was the competition that imbued Pérez’s club with its sense of identity. It is the tournament that has served to both define and cement his presidency.
Pérez, however, did not see the Super League as a replacement for the Champions League. Instead, it would be little more than a new iteration. When one of his favorite media outlets asked him if winning the Super League would count towards Real Madrid’s growing number of European titles, Pérez confirmed that it would. The Champions League, in his opinion, is wherever Real Madrid is.
Over the last decade, it has become a difficult view to challenge. In 2013, Real Madrid harbored a deep-seated fear that they had been cursed in the competition. He had won the last of his nine trophies in 2002; Ending their wait and claiming a tenth title had become something of a fixation.
Pérez had overseen lavish spending in that pursuit (signing stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaká, Xabi Alonso and Karim Benzema) when, in 2013, he paid what was then a world-record fee for Gareth Bale, an explosive Welsh striker. At his presentation press conference, Bale confirmed that he had already learned to say a phrase in Spanish: La décima (the 10).
His vocabulary expanded only a little in the following years, but then it was not necessary. Real Madrid broke their drought the following spring, beating city rival Atlético in Lisbon. Title No. 11 followed, the eleventh, in 2016, and the twelfth, in 2017.
The following year, the tredécima (title number 13) made Real Madrid the first team in almost half a century to win the competition three times in a row. Real Madrid defeated Liverpool in 2022 to give the club its fourteenth (admittedly, the numbers have become less catchy over time) and Pérez the sixth European crown of his presidency.
It is the same number acquired by Santiago Bernabéu, the totemic president of the club’s golden era, the man after whom Real Madrid’s glittering stadium is named. On Saturday at Wembley, Pérez has the opportunity to surpass him.
For the big old clubs of continental Europe – Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus and the rest – the idea of the Super League was the last roll of the dice for a group that feared it could no longer compete with its rivals in England’s Premier League. . , awash in broadcast revenue, and teams like Manchester City and Paris St.-Germain that are backed by nation states. They believed it was the only way to preserve their prestige.
In the case of Real Madrid, that fight no longer seems so pressing. The club is in the midst of a period of dominance unparalleled in the modern era of football. He has a team embroidered with some of the brightest young talents in the world, which will soon be topped by a couple more.
The fact that Pérez continues to fan the embers of the Super League project suggests that the cause is no longer existential angst. Instead, it has become a struggle for control, an assertion of power, a test of strength.
His view – that it is the clubs competing in the Champions League that give the tournament its prestige and appeal and therefore it is the clubs that should be in charge – was perhaps best expressed at a meeting of the members from Real Madrid at the end of last year. year.
“Perhaps,” he told the assembly, to widespread applause, “UEFA needs to be reminded of what Real Madrid is.”
Tariq Panja contributed reporting.