7 of the maddest quotes from the Real Madrid presidential race | OneFootball

While many Premier League owners like to operate in the shadows, that is not the case over in Spain as two men vying for the Real Madrid presidency go toe-to-toe in the media.

Florentino Perez and Enrique Riquelme have been locked in a war of words since the former called an election.

Here are seven of the best, most mental quotes we’ve heard while the pair attempt to out-do each other…

We started off strong let’s be honest.

Near-80 year olds in football is not confined to just Donald Trump and when Perez announced his first press conference in over a decade, many assumed it was to announce he was stepping aside.

How they were wrong.

Perez’s opening line was to confirm the opposite, he was staying and calling elections, kicking this whole thing off.

You can, and we did, do a whole piece just on Perez’s press conference that kickstarted this whole thing but the more days that pass, the more it becomes clear he was speaking to one person in particular.

Perez named no names when speaking of his enemies but did say he was taking on the man with “the Mexican accent.”

That person it transpires is Riquelme who, although born in Spain and is a Spanish citizen, runs his energy business from Mexico.

It’s a page straight out of the Donald Trump playbook. Trump accused Obama of being foreign-born and therefore not eligible to be US president. By suggesting Enrique is of Mexican descent, Perez is saying he should not even be able to run.

It was the first shot across the bows and started an increasingly ugly contest.

“Haaland is joining Real Madrid.”

The propaganda went up a level on Wednesday night when Riquelme appeared on a Spanish TV chat show, teasing he would announce the cornerstone signing of a key player.

That player was Erling Haaland. Riquelme proudly lifted a shirt with the Norwegian’s name on the back but it was news to the Haaland family who quickly released a statement saying it was untrue.

It’s not an entirely new tactic. In 2000, the then candidate Perez delivered quite the election promise – the signing of Luis Figo from rivals Barcelona.

Figo reportedly agreed to it because he never thought Perez would win and had to honour his word, setting him on a course that would see a pig’s head thrown at him.

The “si” of Mourinho

It was only one word, two letters in fact, but the si of Jose Mourinho was the mic drop moment Perez was after.

The return of the Special One had been long rumoured but it appears Perez had kept that ace up his sleeve until the perfect moment, when his opponent would be on live TV.

The seeming confirmation that Mourinho would return to the Bernabeu came during Riquelme’s appearance on El Hormiguero where he announced the entirely-imagined signing of Haaland.

When the camera cut back to the studio, Riquelme looked like a deer in the headlights while Perez presumably smiled in his lair.

Perez’s boastful banners

Perez will likely win the election by a landslide but he is undoubtedly winning the PR war.

Riquelme has gone for the big and bashful approach but Perez’s PR team has let pictures tell a thousand words.

Madrid’s streets have been weaponised with banners, the first of which showed Perez followed by a list of cities – Glasgow, Lisbon, Milan, Cardiff, Kiev, Paris and London – the locations of the seven Champions League wins during his tenure.

Next, there was a banner with Perez’s many Galactico signings and even Cristiano Ronaldo who was actually signed by the previous president. Xabi Alonso was also on there, a man Perez sacked just a few months ago.

Visually, it is far more than Riquelme has been able to muster, who responded with a picture of the Bernabeu with a for sale sign on it.

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Barcelona should ‘disappear’

Of course no Madrid election is complete without some Barcelona slander but Riquelme may have gone a little overboard with it.

On a podcast called the Wild Project which looks like it is filmed in a spare bedroom, Riquelme was asked what he would like to see happen to Barcelona and he said he would be okay for them to “disappear.” If the league becomes boring, he does not care.

Compare that to Perez who decades ago said: “If Barcelona didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them.”

“Everything Riquelme says is like the TV show ‘Everything is a Lie.'”

One of the central issues of this race has been accusations from both sides that their opponent seeks to financially profit from being the president.

While that is obviously true (because let’s be honest, why else would you do it?) they have gone for different tacks in accusing each other.

Perez has accused Riquelme of going full Glazer family and suggested he would saddle the club with debt. Riquelme meanwhile has said Perez’s plan to sell a small section of the fan-owned club is the beginning of a slippery slope.

But Perez delivered the more killer blow in this regard, stating “Everything Riquelme says is like the TV show ‘Everything is a Lie.’” That told him.