After a contentious two years in control at Real Madrid today club President Ramon Calderon has relinquished control to former vice-president Vicente Boluda. Calderon had come under increasing fire this week after reports linking him with voter fraud during a club General Assembly meeting on December 7th. He survived the vote of no-confidence but an investigation revealed that he had used “bused-in” ultra groups to intimidate current members and had even gone as far as to use non-members to rig the vote in his favor. Now everyone is calling on the club to move forward and call a general election to find his permanent successor, but no one should have been surprised. There were signs even from the beginning.
During the 2006 election there were reports that whole blocks of mail-in votes were ignored and that allowed him to squeek past his opponents and seize control of the club. It seemed even then that his hold on the club was tenuous at best. He hired an experienced coach in Capello who had already had a tempestuous reign a decade earlier in Madrid, gave him an inexperienced Sporting Director in Peja Mijatovic, and walked around with the wide-eyed look of a deer in headlights. Calderon was surprised that Capello, noted for his no-nonsense approach to club management and often dour tactics, brought a similar mentality to the capital and almost immediately wanted him gone calling for excitement to return to the Bernabeu. Capello, rather than taking the bait and leaving back to Italy, circled the wagons and won the League again for los blancos stopping only to flip a bird at club leadership. The fiasco of volatile ex-coach Bernt Schuster’s hiring and firing, well I won’t even get into that. Anyone who expected anything less of the German doesn’t remember him as a player, but isn’t it remarkable that his tenure in office, so tainted by his last few weeks in office, seems pale in comparison with that of his boss in hindsight?
Calderon and his underlings were inept in the transfer market. His usual response to bringing in new players was, “Well, we have tons to spend, let’s have it on then!” and then he’d be surprised why other clubs negotiated higher with Madrid than any other club. The transfers he presided over were either haphazard (securing Rafael Van der Vaart even though Wesley Snejder was already on the club and was too similar a player), poorly thought-out (Javier Saviola on a free was no bargain at all), and often lacked coordination with the needs of the squad (losing Robinho after publicly courting Cristano Ronaldo as his replacement and then not having a plan B after that fell through was almost criminal) and it directly led to Schuster’s firing. The most glaring mistake though was one more recent. Seeking to replace the season ending injuries to Ruud Van Nistelrooy and Mamadou Diarra the club sought a quick fix in Ajax striker Klaus Jan Huntelaar and Lassana Diarra from Portsmouth. No one bothered to notice that both players were cup tied to their former clubs and only one of them would be allowed to play for los blancos in Europe.
The rest is history, and speaking of which, some of our listeners have asked how Calderon’s term should be remembered, whether for the comeback under Capello, league wins in key games against derby rivals, and the two consecutive Primera Liga titles, or for another incident during that tenure, of a trip to New York when was detained for hours by the authorities who mistook him for a criminal. Right now, not many of us are thinking of the former.
