Real Madrid Football Club
The Real Madrid Football Club, better known simply as Real Madrid, is a multi-sports entity based in Madrid, Spain. It was declared officially registered as a football club by its members on March 6, 1902 for the purpose of practicing and developing this sport —although its origins date from the year 1900, and its name (Sociedad) Madrid Football Club of October 1901—, being the fifth club founded in the capital. It had Julián Palacios and the brothers Juan Padrós and Carlos Padrós as the main supporters of its creation.
Identified by its white color —from which it receives the nickname "blancos" or "merengues"—, it is one of the four professional soccer clubs in the country whose legal entity is not that of a sports corporation (S.A.D.), since its ownership rests with its more than 90,000 members. Another caveat is shared with the Athletic Club and the Fútbol Club Barcelona by participating without interruption in the highest category of the National Professional Soccer League, the First Division of Spain, since its establishment in 1929. In it he has the honors of having been the first historical leader of the competition, the club with the most titles, and the one with the highest score in a single edition.
Devoted from the beginning to the development of soccer, it soon acquired a multi-sport nature and developed several other disciplines that gradually disappeared over the years, with the exception of the basketball section, called Real Madrid Basketball. There were several speculations in the recent history of the entity about the possibility of recovering some of them such as the handball section, or the rugby section that did not materialize, unlike a women's soccer section, a plot that since the years 2010 the club worked to create with a base from the training cycle to the highest category. Finally in 2019, and taking another of the possible paths for its creation, the merger by absorption of Club Deportivo took place TACON was approved at an extraordinary meeting by the delegate members and thus formed the Real Madrid Women's Football Club.
He is a creative, founder and co-founder member of several of the longest-running Spanish competitions before the existence of the relevant governing bodies: the Central Regional Championship, or the Spanish Cup. On an international level, he was one of the founding members of FIFA, an estate that awarded it the Order of Merit for its special relevance in football and points it out as one of the "classic clubs" in Spain after collaborating in the birth of some of the most important competitions or associations prestigious such as the European Cup, the Intercontinental Cup, or the Association of European Clubs. It takes the same path in the basketball section, where it is, together with Club Joventut Badalona, the only club that has always played since its creation in 1957 the highest league category, of which it is also a founding member, as well as the homonymous European Cup, or the international Christmas Tournament.
In terms of sporting achievements, it is one of the most successful and recognized entities in the world in both disciplines, and has been awarded nationally and internationally by FIFA as the Best Club of the 20th century, as the Best European and World Club of the 20th century by the International Federation of Football History and Statistics (IFFHS), and as the best Club of the 21st Century by the Globe Soccer organization. Between both disciplines there are a total of twelve world championships and twenty-four European Cups, more than any other European club in both sports combined, ranking tenth in the multi-sports record if sections that the club does not have are taken into account. At the national level it is the most successful Spanish club.
Seventeen former members of the club were included in the FIFA Hall of Fame, a project dedicated to preserving the memory of important figures in football history, highlighting some as "deans" for their special significance, or that of the own club as an entity.
33% of soccer fans surveyed as of 2021 in Spain by the market statistics and opinion portal Statista point to it as the most popular club, while internationally it is also one of the most recognized entities in the world with an estimated 500 million followers in 2020. The number of supporters, with close to 20 million monthly visits on Google, makes it one of the sports associations with the highest value in the market and one of the ones that obtains the most profits annually. Its value is appraised at around 5.1 billion dollars and its income is over seven hundred million euros per season, with an estimated amount of 653 million without counting player transfers in the 2020-21 academic year. It has a budget of 695 million —alleviated by the covid-19 pandemic and which would have risen to over 900 million under normal conditions— while it acquired net debt for the first time in five years —46 million, also as a result of covid-19, and assumable in solvency parameters. Its price as a soccer club with the most value is only surpassed in comparison by the Dallas Cowboys of American football and the New York Yankees of baseball, while it is the fifteenth most valuable brand in Spain, the first of the sports sector.
He owns a non-profit foundation dedicated to social work of international cooperation in favor of development around the world.
History
Background and a confusing origin
After the first foot-ball proto-clubs that emerged in Madrid at the end of the XIX century, a group of young and old members of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE) formed a team in 1897 that turned out to be the predecessor of the Madrid entity, the Sociedad de Foot-Ball, the first to emerge in the region to the exclusive practice of a sport that came from England and which, due to various circumstances, ended up suffering a split in October 1900. The insufficient and not very correct chronicles of the time do not allow us to clarify with certainty what happened until 1902. There are two hypotheses regard. The first indicates that it was divided into two clubs, Nueva Sociedad de Foot-Ball and (Society) Sky Foot-Ball, which would merge in 1901 to give rise to (Society) Madrid Foot-Ball Club. The other hypothesis and possibly the most probable according to the chronicles, says that it would end in 1901 with a restructuring of this New Society that emerged in November 1900 to be called (Society) Madrid Foot-Ball Club after being joined by some members of the First Society. It can therefore be affirmed that in 1901 it adopted the name that followed it from then on, without being able to verify its foundation in that year or in a previous one, and its legalization concluded in 1902 as the date that appears in their records. The sources cite Julián Palacios as the first president of the Nueva Sociedad, and after Madrid F. C. —whether or not it was the same club.
Just a few dozen members made up the entity due to the limited extent of soccer in the country, a sport that did not yet have its own venues or properly formed for its practice. For this reason the enthusiastic équipiers They were spread over different open fields and areas of the city such as the Campo del Retiro, inherited from Sky Foot-Ball. The first recorded match of the team dates from October 6, 1901 in the aforementioned location.
At the Extraordinary General Meeting held on March 6, 1902, its first statutes were approved, just as football clubs were urged by the Royal Decree of the Government of September 19, 1901 for their regularization and registration in the Register of Associations, thus being the founding date for official purposes.
The members elected their first leaders, headed by Juan Padrós as the first president-elect and Enrique Varela as vice-president, in addition to agreeing on the purpose and regulations of the society or the team uniform.
White in pants and a shirt with black socks and a dark blue cap were the approved colors and had been common since 1900, long before the long administrative process began. This culminated after a Royal Circular Order, of April 9, 1902, in which the last requirement was urged to refer to the Civil Governance of their city. The act of the people of Madrid was drawn up on April 18 to be answered by the administration four days later.
“Juan Padrós y Rubio, del Comercio de Madrid, which lives on the street of the Madrazo, 25-3Q left, to V.E. respectfully exposes: That in order to constitute a Sport Games Society, which will be called MADRID FOOT BALL CLUB, it accompanies you the basis for which you have to register, for your approval.”Juan Padrós. 18 April 1902. Madrid
Thus, said founding act formed what were the first legal bases of the club, despite the fact that it had already worked some time ago. Below are some of the most notable points dictated at its headquarters in Alcalá 48:
“TITLE 2.o - SOCIEDY OBJECTArticle 17.o - In order to encourage hobby to the game of the foot-ball, society will organize games whenever possible and at certain times will hold contests and will intervene directly or indirectly in the holidays of this kind that are organized and created can increase the hobby.
Chapter 4.
Article 18. - To take part in the games will be required: 1o. Prepayment of the month or entry fee, according to the cases. Use the regulatory uniform. Get to the playing field before the time indicated for the start of the game. The statutory uniform will be for ordinary matches dark, short and straight blue pants, white blouse and dark stocks, and for extraordinary parties will be: pants and white blouse, black stockings with round and belt with national colors, completing this uniform a dark blue casket.
Article 19. - The matches will be played strictly in accordance with the regulations of the Football Asociation of England, of 1901-1902, and the partner who lacked any of its rules, will be reprimanded for the first time by the arbitrator, and in case of recidivism, the arbitrator will bring him to the attention of his board of directors to take the decision he deems appropriate.”Club board. 18 April 1902. Madrid.
In the 1950s, the socks became white, and since then that has been the only distinctive color of the institution when combined with a shirt and shorts. To elucidate what was its first starting team after becoming official, On March 9, he played a match between his players, differing from each other by colored bands that crossed the uniform shirt. The Heraldo del Sport and La Correspondencia de España, newspapers of the time, reported on the events and disputes related to the club in the "Band Competition" or the "Madrid Football Association Competition". The latter, of an inter-regional nature and organized by the club, was recognized as the first tournament played at a national level and in which they won the first trophy in their history, as runner-up. It was the competition that gave rise to the Spanish Cup Championship.
Growth as an institution. A Royal Club
The conclusion of the national competition led to institutional growth, which began with the addition of players to a squad among which the knowledge of the game of its British member Arthur Johnson stood out. His involvement with the development of foot-ball Madrid and Spanish, and the lack of a national federation, made the Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques (USFSA) summon him as the country's representative at the first Congress of the Foot-Ball Association on May 21, 1904. In it he was, along with six other federations, a founding member of the International Association Football Federation (in French, Fédération Internationale de Football Association - FIFA).
After the first five years of the century, numerous soccer teams germinated in the capital that increased competition, which is why the club absorbed the Moderno Foot-Ball Club, the Association Sportive Amicale, and in 1907 the Moncloa Foot-Ball Club. Ball Club to cover the losses due to the resignation of some of its members to found the Spanish Club of Madrid and Athletic Club (Madrid Branch). The latter was a branch team in Madrid of the Bilbao Athletic Club, its first recognized rival, which led to the current Atlético de Madrid. Meanwhile, Carlos Padrós was appointed president, replacing his brother Juan and focused his tasks as leader on social growth at the club level, and federation at the regional level.
The club ended its first decade of life with numerous victories in the competitions recently created by Padrós through the Madrid Association of Foot-ball Clubs, or Madrid Federation of Foot-Ball Societies, which he chaired and that he combined with that of Madrid. His results in the Madrid Championship, popularly known as the "Regional Championship", gave him the right to participate and defend Madrid or the Central region in the Spanish Championship. After regular performances in its first two editions, he was awarded consecutively the following four championships between 1904 and 1908, his first official titles at the state level. With the condition of Spanish champion, the president organized an international match on October 23, 1905 on the occasion of the visit to Spain of the French president Émile Loubet in order to increase the projection of the club. Gallia Club de Paris, French champion, and Madrid F.C. tied at one goal at the Madrid Hippodrome. for its improvement, the British Johnson was named the first coach in the history of the club for his knowledge of the game.
Already relocated to a O'Donnell Stadium that catered to the fast-growing social and popular with fans and rented for the exclusive use of the club was endorsed by the president Pedro Parages, he alternated in the conquest of the regional championships with Gimnástica de Madrid and Racing de Madrid. During those editions he did not win the Spanish Cup again until the 1917 edition when he beat Arenas Club de Guecho in Barcelona.
The magnitude that the club was acquiring became more and more notable, and thus came June 29, 1920, the date of one of the most outstanding events in white history: the reception of a brief letter from of the King of Spain Alfonso XIII de Borbón addressed to the president of the club. It quoted:
“His Majesty the King (q. D. g.) has been granted the title of “Real” to that Club of Football, of which V. is a worthy president, which, in the future, may be preceded by its denomination. What of Real order I participate to V. for its knowledge and effects. God save V for many years.”Alfonso XIII de Borbón. June 29, 1920. Madrid.
From that moment the club acquired a name that it maintains today, Real Madrid Foot-Ball Club, and as such the right to wear the royal crown on its shield. Reciprocally, Parages named the eldest son Alfonso de Borbón y Battenberg honorary president of the Society.
After the events, the team consolidated its victories in the regional championships of the 1920s, but not in the Spanish Cup, a competition that it did not manage to win again until before the Civil War, and which, however,, did not stop its expansion. As champion of Madrid, he toured extensively in Europe in addition to undertaking his first trip to America to make himself known in the rest of the world. Although the balance was not very positive at a time when playing as a visitor was a handicap due to the little information that was available about the rival teams and their styles of play, the club obtained greater recognition and income that allowed the entity to continue its evolution.
Among the players of the time, one stood out among the rest for his charisma and goalscoring ability, and who years later ended up being the main character of the entity: Santiago Bernabéu. His sports performance led the board to consider the acquisition of a fully owned stadium, and thus, after wandering around different fields in Madrid, he inaugurated in 1924 the Real Madrid Club de Fútbol Field, popularly known as the "Chamartín Stadium" for the adjoining municipality that was annexed to the capital in 1948: Chamartín de la Rosa. With the new stadium, another of its hallmarks was released, the purple stripe of the shield.
Professionalism and the difficulties of war
In 1926 the professionalization of soccer arrived in Spain, and after a failed attempt, in 1929 the National League Championship was inaugurated, organized by the already existing Royal Spanish Soccer Federation (RFEF). Established as the most important competition in the country, the Real Madrid Foot-Ball Club took part in its premiere for being one of the winners of the Spanish Cup Championship along with nine other teams.
A defeat against Athletic Club on the last day of the tournament deprived them of a title that F.C. Barcelona won and left a record of the dispute that the three teams were already manifesting and that increased their rivalry in subsequent years. After finishing fifth in the second edition and given the scarcity of new titles —with the exception of the regional championships—, the 1930-31 season began with numerous signings aimed at changing that trend. Among them, the one of the Spanish international goalkeeper Ricardo Zamora stood out, for which 150,000 pesetas were paid to the Real Club Deportivo Español de Barcelona, one of the highest prices of the time. Despite the financial outlay, the team had a discreet participation and finished in sixth place in the standings mainly due to the team's scoring shortage, caused by the retirement of its prolific strikers.
After the championship ended, the King of Spain abdicated and the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed, which led to the suppression of all symbols or allusions to the monarchical era in the country. For this reason, the entity lost the title of royalty granted by Alfonso XIII de Borbón and was renamed Madrid Foot-Ball Club again. Just two days after the political events, it participated in the Spanish Cup while officially founding its branches of basketball, Real Madrid Basket-Ball, developed since 1929, and swimming, which joined the already existing and pioneering sections of rugby, baseball, athletics, hockey and cycling. For them the club built a gymnasium and facilities in the annexes of the stadium in keeping with its status as a multi-sports entity, and The development of new sports and athletes was promoted by Heliodoro Ruiz, a famous graduate professor.
basketball, introduced to Spain by Eusebio Millán, soon became the second most important section of the club and quickly became popular. This was created by Ángel Cabrera, the same promoter of the Castilla Championship in which "the whites" won their first titles after some competitive duels with the Rayo Club of Madrid.
The soccer team won its first league, undefeated, in its fourth edition. It was the second Spanish team to achieve it in such a way after Athletic Club, a fact not repeated by any other club as of 2021. After revalidating the title with Manuel Olivares as "pichichi" of the championship, he won two new cup titles after beat Valencia Club de Fútbol and F. C. Barcelona in 1934 and 1936 respectively. The latter was remembered for an improbable save by Ricardo Zamora in injury time of the match, marked as the culmination of his career and which was followed by his retirement from sports. His career was cut short by a convulsive political situation in the country which led to the outbreak of the Civil War and which led to the suspension of sports activities between 1936 and 1939. Once resolved in the Dictatorship of Francisco Franco, the club recovered its title and name of "Real" while at the same time competitions resumed.
However, the war left Real Madrid very depleted and with hardly any members due to ostracism and the departure of some of them to other clubs, for which reason it was forced to rebuild at all levels within the society. Football, wrestling —a department created a few days before the outbreak of the armed conflict—, swimming and basketball were only representative sports of the club, while disciplines such as the women's basketball section that won the Castilla championship in the year 1934, the same as its foundation, were greatly affected. On April 18, 1939, the board of directors called an assembly from which the club started from scratch, as a return to the beginnings and the reconstruction of the Estadio de Chamartín, whose pitch was destroyed by the war. With the new planning, midfielder Sabino Barinaga arrived at the club, from the Southampton Football Club of England.
The presidency of Santiago Bernabéu. The golden age of Di Stéfano
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In the midst of the reconstruction period, which was perhaps the hardest period at an institutional level, two events took place: on June 13, in the second leg of the semifinals of the 1943 Generalissimo Cup, the soccer team achieved the biggest win in its history against C. F. Barcelona by winning 11 goals to 1; and on September 15, the former soccer player and former coach Santiago Bernabéu was unanimously appointed as white president. Close to losing the category in the 1947-48 season, the revolutionary "WM" Englishman Michael Keeping saved the team from relegation, although it finished in eleventh position, the worst for the club in the championship. Located among the teams in the middle table, it completed some irregular years in which it consolidated itself as a multi-sports entity of renown in the country, and contemplated the idea of building a sports complex in accordance with said projection and giving it renewed impetus. A slow rehabilitation after the war events resulted in few sporting achievements and the president, in a first step, decided to build in the land adjacent to the "Chamartín Stadium" a new venue, the Real Madrid Club de Fútbol Stadium or "New Chamartín Stadium". Along with it came the establishment of the Agrupación Deportiva Plus Ultra for the purpose of looking for new footballers to train before incorporating them into the first team. The measure, adopted among other reasons so as not to damage a battered economy, was completed with agreements with several Madrid clubs that served as a quarry since 1920 in exchange for sports equipment and various aid for their development, until A.D. Plus Ultra signed an agreement in 1947 in favor of which it became its first official and exclusive subsidiary, thus formalizing its lower categories.
Under Bernabéu's tenure, the club experienced its "first golden age", during which it developed institutional and social growth that contributed significant economic income and reciprocal multi-sports successes that fed back. After reestablishing the athletics section, he founded new sections such as tennis, boxing, palm bowling, ball, handball, gymnastics, weightlifting, rowing, and chess, although it was the volleyball section that eventually became the third most important discipline of the club and the one that lasted the longest among them.
This led to March 6, 1952, the date of the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the entity, for which President Bernabéu organized various events, including an international soccer tournament and another basketball. Events followed the arrival at the club of Alfredo Di Stéfano, Raimundo Saporta, and Paco Gento from Cantabria. They were considered by the specialized press as the sporting pillars of international success, in addition of becoming some of the most influential figures in the history of the club through his career.
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Reinforced later with Raymond Kopa, José Santamaría and striker Ferenc Puskás from the «magical magyars», the team became known as «Di Stéfano's Madrid» and marked an era both nationally and internationally. The victories in the Copa Latina —an attempt to organize a tournament between clubs from the Old Continent—, were the prelude to the most prestigious titles of the club.
The initiative of Gabriel Hanot, editor of the French newspaper L'Équipe, to found a European Cup for clubs was seconded by Santiago Bernabéu as vice-president and direct collaborator. Its materialization had the approval and involvement of the Union of European Football Associations, and since then brought together the champions of the different European leagues to dispute a title to designate the best team on the continent. The people of Madrid won the first five editions and they became the benchmark on the football scene. The last one, against Eintracht Frankfurt Fußball in Glasgow, was defeated 7-3 in front of 135,000 spectators, and after it, the English newspaper The Times categorized white players as "Vikings" writing:
“Real wanders through Europe as the Vikings once walked, destroying everything in its path”
(“The Real Madrid strolls through Europe as the Vikings were walking, dragging everything in their way”)The Times. May 19, 1960. London.
This final and the five consecutive European Cups remain the best performances by a team in the history of the competition as of 2021. In addition, as a result of the 1960 title, the club participated and won a new competition recently established by UEFA and the South American Football Confederation (Conmebol) jointly: the Intercontinental Cup. European Cup) elucidated the club with the de facto honorary title of "world champion", and later fully recognized by FIFA in 2017.
"Di Stéfano's Madrid" thus placed the club as a benchmark and received recognition and praise from the media, fans and rival teams. The nineteen titles won in little more than ten years made Madrid footballers were internationally recognized with the L'Équipe Ballon d'Or, an award for the best soccer player in the world according to a jury of experts, taking the trophy podium during those years. It was during this period and after the one considered the strictest period of the current dictatorship in Spain, when the victories of Real Madrid in Europe were taken by the regime as a way to improve its image at an international and propaganda level. This relationship was branded years later since other entities as a supposed institutional favor to the Madrid team despite the legal and purely sporting nature of their victories, which was not, however, as evident and significant as in other clubs such as Club Atlético de Madrid or Fútbol Club Barcelona, but it did not have as much repercussions as it did not have the same successes at the international level.
The generational change continues in the wake
The year after his fifth continental title, the one that over the years became his biggest rival, CF Barcelona, was the cause of his first European elimination. Despite reaching two finals again in the successive edition In 1962 and in 1964, the team accused its seniority and a generational change took place at the hands of coach Miguel Muñoz, a former member of the successful group.
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The old idols of the club gave way to a team of young Spaniards like Enrique Pérez Pachín, Pedro de Felipe, Manuel Sanchís, José Martínez Pirri, Ignacio Zoco, Paco Serena, Amancio Amaro, Ramón Grosso or Manuel Velázquez; all of them captained by the veteran Paco Gento. Despite his sporting achievements, sections such as baseball, handball, or rugby disappeared, while Di Stéfano was kidnapped by members of the Venezuelan National Liberation Armed Forces during the Little World Cup in Caracas. Two alleged policemen showed up at the concentration hotel inviting him to accompany them to the police station for a crime of drug trafficking. In the car they confirmed the kidnapping that ended with his release two days later without much problem:
“This is a kidnapping. Nothing's gonna happen to her. We are revolutionaries who do not agree with the regime of our country. We'll let him go right away."Di Stéfano kidnappers. August 20, 1963. Caracas
Three years later, in 1966 and when the Spanish-Argentine player retired, the white team won the European Cup again after defeating Fudbalski klub Partizan in Belgrade 2-1. The team was popularly remembered as the "Madrid yeyé". With the win, Paco Gento became the player who has won the most titles in the competition, with six —a current record as of 2021—, while the club added eight finals in eleven years of competition.
At that time, Raimundo Saporta became vice-president of the club, and stood out for his efforts as a manager in the basketball section in particular, and of the club in general. An anecdote of social work for the club was reflected in an act de Bernabéu and Saporta himself during Christmas the previous year in Hungary. Despite the country's political conflicts with those belonging to the communist regime, to which none of its natives were allowed to enter Spain, Bernabéu meditated on his response to the request of those present to express a wish that the Hungarians could carry out to honor him, and stated:
“He lives in Spain a man you know very well. His name is Ladislao Kubala. They're going to make almost thirteen years to embrace their old mother who's still living in Hungary. You know, as much as I do, that various problems of political order prevent these two beings from being seen. I want you at this moment to offer me the possibility of providing Kubala, who doesn't play for my club, your mother's hug... ”Santiago Bernabéu. December 1961. Budapest.
That was how, a few days later, the mother of Ladislao Kubala, coach and emblematic former player of his Barcelona rivals, was able to travel to Spain after almost thirteen years without seeing her son thanks to a special visa to spend Christmas with him and his grandchildren. Thus, the club's philosophy of putting people before entities was revealed.
World benchmark
The successes and growth of the other sections led the club to build its first basketball venue in 1966, the Ciudad Deportiva Pavilion, located in the club's also new sports facilities in the so-called Ciudad Deportiva del Real Madrid Club de Fútbol, inaugurated on May 18, 1963. These were built under the need to expand and house the sports sections in a common space that fostered their environment and development.
It also managed to become the best European basketball club after winning the European Cup four times, reaching seven finals in eight editions, with players like Lolo Sáinz, Clifford Luyk, Wayne Brabender or Emiliano Rodríguez under the direction by Pedro Ferrándiz.
Successes followed one another at the multi-sports level, where the volleyball and baseball teams were proclaimed league and cup champions. In tennis, which had been reinforced by different players, the figure of Manuel Santana, champion of the 1966 Wimbledon Championship with the Madrid club's shield on his chest, stood out.
However, at the institutional level, the economic situation worsened due to the difficulty of maintaining some of the sports sections with the least impact and little income, which is why several of them were suppressed at the beginning of the 1970s, while the Plus Ultra Sports Association —soccer affiliate—, was doomed to disappear. It was then that Bernabéu, to avoid this, bought its federative rights and officially became the property of the club and was placed under the sports dependence of the first team, Real Madrid, as Castilla Club de Fútbol. The club, during this decade, added among all its sections seventeen league championships, fourteen cup championships, two European Cups, and three World Cups, as the most important titles at an official level, which led to the founding of new branches such as archery, ice hockey, figure skating, futsal or fencing.
On June 2, 1978, one year after the 75th anniversary of its foundation, Santiago Bernabéu passed away. Recognized by the managers and members of the club themselves as the best and most charismatic president that the entity had had throughout its history, and one of those who most favored its evolution, he was linked to the club for more than fifty years.
The splendor of the eighties and the so-called "modern football"
Despite the fact that Raimundo Saporta was nominated as his successor within the entity, he declined the position and was filled by Luis de Carlos. With the challenge of being the successor to the charismatic Bernabéu, he knew how to maintain the values rooted by this, a circumstance that earned him recognition from the world of football by leading the club in the transition period, at the time that Saporta left the club. To honor the memory of Bernabéu, a football tournament was organized on August 31, 1979 and with the added purpose of seeing the best teams and players in the world in the white fiefdom. Thus, he was invited to the first edition of the so-called Santiago Trophy Bernabéu to three European champions: Fußball Club Bayern München, Amsterdamsche Football Club Ajax and Associazione Calcio Milan.
The basketball discipline was joined by Mirza Delibašić, Steve Malovic and a very young center Fernando Martín, considered the best Spanish player of the time and the first Spaniard and second European to play in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The team The football subsidiary lived its best years, achieving runner-up in the 1980 Copa del Rey, the final of which was a praise to Madridismo, as it was played at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium between its two professional teams: Real Madrid C.F. and Castilla Club de Soccer. The first team won 6-1, and it was the first time that two teams from the same club had won both places for a championship dispute, something never happened in Europe, and allowing Castilla C. F. to be the first subsidiary team and second category to play a European competition. Players such as Agustín Rodríguez, Ricardo Gallego or Francisco Pineda were active in that team, predecessors of what would be for many fans the best generation of homegrown players that the club has produced in its history: "La Quinta del Buitre".
With the new decade, the club was once again the protagonist in Europe in both sections. A runner-up in the 1981 European Soccer Cup, after fifteen years without reaching the final, and two UEFA Cups, joined the achievements of basketball, whose section was celebrating its 50th anniversary, championed by its seventh Cup of Europe, his first European Cup Winners' Cup, and the recently launched World Club Championship - formerly the Intercontinental Cup -.
These new generations rekindled the successes of the 1950s and 1960s, increasing the club's palmares and relevance, adding more than a hundred titles in just four decades, establishing itself as one of the sports benchmarks worldwide.
During the eighties the club experienced a new splendor championed by its soccer and basketball sections, almost the only two representatives of the entity since most of the other sports sections had been closed.
In basketball, the team was close to winning all the titles in contention in the 1984-85 season, after being proclaimed champion of the League, Cup, and Super Cup, and being defeated in the final of the European Cup, where they found themselves with which he became one of his "black beasts", the Košarkaški Klub Cibona led by the then considered best European basketball player and future player of the club, Dražen Petrović. The successes were repeated the following season with a new national double and where again the Serbian player from K.K. Cibona eliminated the whites in the semifinals of the European tournament that they finally won for the second consecutive year against Žalgiris Kaunas led by a young Arvydas Sabonis, who also joined the Madrid team afterwards.
At the end of the decade the triumphs of the basketball section accompanied those of soccer, and the team finally got even with the Balkans. The returns to the discipline of Pedro Ferrándiz, Lolo Sáinz and Fernando and Antonio Martín, led the club to win the Korać Cup, the only basketball title of those currently in force in Europe that was missing from the club's showcases. This converted Sáinz he became the first coach to achieve all three continental competitions, and he attracted Petrović to the club. The following year he won his second European Cup Winners' Cup in what for many connoisseurs of this sport was the best basketball game seen to date in the old continent. The duel between Petrović and the Brazilian Óscar Schmidt from Snaidero de Caserta was won by the madridista, author of 62 points against the 44 of the carioca for a 117-113 final for their teams. Unfortunately, it was the last appearance in Europe of the charismatic Fernando Martín, who died in a tragic traffic accident on December 3, 1989. The club retired the number 10 in his honor; the only one withdrawn by the people of Madrid. A tragic paradox once again crossed the paths of two of the greatest basketball players in the club's history: Dražen Petrović died in Germany under similar circumstances to Fernando just one year later.
"The Vulture's Fifth"
In soccer, what is known as the generation of soccer players from "La Quinta del Buitre" was forged in Amancio Amaro's Castilla Club de Fútbol. This group won what was the greatest achievement in the history of the subsidiary team: the Second Division title in 1984. The following year they progressively promoted Alfredo Di Stéfano's first team, then the coach, one by one. year the Spanish-Argentine managed to lead the team to play five finals, which he could not win, however.
With these young footballers established in the first team and led by Emilio Butragueño from Madrid, who gave the group its name, the club won a Copa del Rey in 1989, two consecutive UEFA Cup titles, in 1985 and 1986, and five consecutive Leagues (1986-90) —equaling the record of Madrid in the sixties of Di Stéfano and as the only times that a team has achieved such a record in Spain.
The comebacks that occurred in European tournaments forged the term "stage fright", in reference to the fervor of the fans at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium and their supposed influence on the rival, indicated as one of the factors of the favorable results, turning the playoffs around in some very adverse results. That term was coined as a result of the first comeback, which later led to their first UEFA Cup title. Going. Later in the semifinals, at the end of the first leg at the San Siro after losing 2-0 against FC Internazionale Milano, the Madrid player Juan Gómez Juanito told the Italian defender Graziano Bini after his effusive celebrations a phrase that remained for him. I remember:
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“Ninety minuti in the Bernabéu are long...[sic]”
(“Ninety minutes at Bernabéu are very long...”)Juan Gómez. 10 April 1985. Milan.
Madrid came back from behind after beating the Italians 3-0 to reach the final. In the following edition, there were two other great comebacks. The first against German Borussia Mönchengladbach, against whom they came back from 5-1 in the first leg, to win by four goals to nil in Madrid thanks to the double value of the goal in the rival field. In the semifinals they met F.C. Internazionale Milano again. In the first leg, the white team lost 3-1 and the Italians celebrated the victory as if it were the final. However, the team again traced the result fourteen days later, when they won 5-1, thus accessing the final after extra time.
In addition to the other four members of "La Quinta" (Míchel González, Manolo Sanchís, Rafael Martín Vázquez, and Miguel Pardeza, who never established himself in the first team), Mexican striker Hugo was part of this generation. Sánchez, from Atlético de Madrid: he was one of the best scorers in the club's history, and together with Rafael Gordillo, Paco Buyo, Juanito, Fernando Hierro, and Bernd Schuster created an almost unbeatable team called "La Quinta de los Machos" » which also achieved the historic scoring record in a league championship with 107 goals, which remained unbeatable until the 2011-12 season. President Luis de Carlos retired from the presidency before concluding his second term due to his advanced age in 1985 and was succeeded by Ramón Mendoza. Despite having a great generation of leading footballers in Spain during that decade, Mendoza could not get a new seventh European Cup either, longed for by the club, remaining in 1988 and despite being considered a favorite to achieve it, just one step to play the final after being eliminated in the semifinals by Philips Sport Vereniging, future champion of that edition, in the so-called "Black Night of Eindhoven". The maximum continental title had resisted the club for twenty years.
The entity closed a new golden stage and gave way to the recent stage, where its dominance weakened, to take place the years of greatest sports dispute experienced in Spain since the early years of the century XX, as football in particular was increasingly plunging and evolving into a marketing and sponsorship spiral. Said circumstance, in which the economic and capitalist aspects began to acquire a notorious relevance to the detriment of the purely sporting, was described as a "modern football" in which each aspect that involves the game was studied and perfected in depth to have greater competition and repercussion for retroactive economic effects.
Maximum competition and contests at the national level
With the new decade the controversial and charismatic ex-soccer player of the club Juan Gómez Juanito, a symbol of the team for more than ten years, died in another traffic accident on April 2, 1992 on his return to Mérida after witnessing a Real Madrid match Madrid against Torino Football Club in the UEFA Cup. His caste on the pitch has been remembered since then at the Madrid stadium with chants alluding to him every minute seven of the game, his number number.
The team, affected by the event, saw the dominance that made them dominate in Spain diminish to the detriment of the good moment that their sports rival was going through, Johan Cruyff's F. C. Barcelona. They lost two consecutive league championships in the last match of both seasons against the same club: Club Deportivo Tenerife, in which they were baptized as "the Tenerife Leagues" (1992 and 1993). Despite this, they managed to win a Copa del Rey in the 1992-93 edition, which It was the one that began a long drought of titles in two decades in this competition.
The departure of Butragueño, Martín Vázquez, Hugo Sánchez and Míchel gave way to a new generation, in which another player from the youth academy emerged who later became one of the best in the club: Raúl González. His high goalscoring records gave him they quickly ascended through the lower categories until he was the youngest player to debut in the league with the white shirt. After a memorable debut against Real Zaragoza, the man from Madrid scored his first goal as a professional against top local rival: Atlético de Madrid, his previous training club. After him he scored 322 more and stood at the end of his time at the club as its all-time top scorer after surpassing Di Stéfano's previous mark. With him as a bulwark along with Michael Laudrup, Fernando Redondo, or Iván Zamorano, the team managed to win the 1994-95 league championship and thus break Barcelona's hegemony in the competition.
In this period, the economic aspects, essentially related to marketing, were further increased, which established the aforementioned term "modern football", although it is true that in sports the term came from earlier times. Several detractors found this development in what they indicated was a loss of the essence of the game, Among them they highlighted the irruption of large companies for its exploitation, legislative decisions such as the Bosman Law or pay television inflated a sport that began to be closely linked with the business world. The club adapted to the changes and there was a foreignization in the club to the detriment of national players, while its economic debt grew to historical levels. Despite this, it was having repercussion in sports and years later it ended up being one of the hallmarks of the club and an active participant in its institutional growth, and even being the object of study for its recognition. well-known management.
The Spaniards and homegrown players José María Gutiérrez Guti and Álvaro Benito were an exception to the signings of Davor Šuker, Peđa Mijatović, Roberto Carlos, Clarence Seedorf or Christian Panucci. The high expenses and the non-classification of the team to European competition for the second time in its history since those tournaments were established, which led to the resignation of the presidency of Ramón Mendoza. Succeeded by Lorenzo Sanz, he continued to increase a debt that, however, was the prelude to the conquest of the 1996-97 League. The Italian coach Fabio Capello, a reference for the Associazione Calcio Milan in the early years of the decade, was the first of a succession of dismissals of coaches that led to sporting instability years later.
The best club of the 20th century and the arrival of Florentino Pérez.
Prior to this unstable period, the club won what was known by the Madrid fans as "the seventh" European Cup —a competition renamed since the 1992-93 edition as the Champions League— after defeating Juventus Football Club with a solitary goal by Peđa Mijatovic.
Despite the triumph, they obtained a poor classification in the League, for which the president fired Heynckes just six days later, evidence of the high demand of the club with respect to the coaches. The Intercontinental Cup achieved by Guus Hiddink, his replacement, was not enough to maintain the position either and Vicente del Bosque from Salamanca, former player of the club and in charge of the lower categories, arrived in his place.
Knowing the historical importance of the youth academy in the entity, he gave confidence to the young and promising goalkeeper Iker Casillas—who made his debut in a match against Athletic Club at "La Catedral" at just eighteen years old—, and who with the passing of the years he came to be considered the best goalkeeper in the world, according to FIFA and the IFFHS. Said organizations decorated the club for its career as the Best Club of the 20th century, and as the Best European and World Club of the century XX by the International Federation of Football History and Statistics (IFFHS).
Del Bosque led the conquest of "the eighth" European Cup after defeating Valencia CF 3-0 in Paris, a final that for the first time included two teams from the same country. The team achieved notable performances that momentarily stabilized the institutional future.
As far as basketball is concerned, he maintained the line of good results and won his eighth European Cup and two new European Cup Winners' Cups (1992 and 1997) to be the most successful team in both competitions. the possibility of suppressing the section because the successes were not as common as years ago and especially due to the large financial losses that it generated by increasing the club's debt, something that finally did not happen.
The Madrid of “the galactics”
After the international triumphs on July 16, 2000, the club called presidential elections. Sanz lost in his re-election to Florentino Pérez, who from this moment became the fifteenth president of the entity, with the promises of ending the club's great financial debt and making it the reference team in the world —a similarity of the Santiago Bernabéu period-, and the signing of Luís Figo -emblem and captain of FC Barcelona-. The Portuguese was one of the architects of the 2000-01 League conquest along with Raúl, "pichichi" of championship with 24 goals.
Since then, the club followed the policy of hiring the best players in the world to give the club greater projection and income. This policy continued with the signing of French playmaker Zinedine Zidane, Brazilian striker Ronaldo Nazário and English midfielder David Beckham —nicknamed by the press as "Los galacticos", a nickname that was never liked by either the players or the club. That helped make the team one of the most prestigious in the world once again, along with a new batch of homegrown players The mixture of both generations coined the term "Zidanes y Pavones", pronounced by the president Florentino Pérez who said it was one of the historical essences of the club:
“In the club historically the best players in the world have always lived with the players from the quarry, the “Zidanes” and the “Pavones”. [...] The only thing I have done is to follow the path that Santiago Bernabéu marked us: great players of the best in the world (Di Stéfano), the best in Spain (Amancio) and, with them, those who form in the quarry (Raoul)”Florentino Pérez. 9 June 2009. Madrid.
Two new League titles and especially the ninth European Cup in 2002 —achieved 2-1 against Bayer Leverkusen Fußball thanks to a historic volley goal by Zidane recognized by UEFA and France Football as the best of the competition finals—, plunged the club into a successful sporting and institutional period in the year of its Centenary, in addition to leading the club to reach an unimaginable projection years ago, reaching places as remote as Asia, especially in China and the United Arab Emirates, or in the United States with a soccer culture still in an emerging period and with little tradition, but with very high economic power. It was after the World Cup held there in 1994 when some sources say that soccer began to become global.
Heading along this line, the club began extensive and numerous tours to continue with the expansion of the entity, reaching its highest economic records and popularity, which were reinforced with numerous agreements, among which the sale of the Ciudad Deportiva del Paseo de la Castellana, thanks to which the club carried out one of its most ambitious projects years later: the construction of Real Madrid City.
The good future of the centenary gave way to a period of three consecutive years without titles and bad records such as losing five consecutive games, the worst streak in the club's league history. Caused by a bad sports reconstruction and the instability established between the coaches, where in eighteen months up to four coaches came to pass through the bench, affected the entity. An early elimination in the Copa del Rey, in the European Cup, and a defeat against R. C. D. Mallorca in the League, led to the resignation of Florentino and the entry into possibly the worst institutional stage of the club since the war.
With Ramón Calderón in the presidency after controversial elections due to an alleged rigging in the results, the entity faced a severe crisis. Despite achieving important titles such as "The Burning Nail League" or the "Cesarini League", achieved unexpectedly due to the disadvantage with their rivals and with comebacks in the last moments of each game, in the so-called "Cesarini zone", an unusual event occurred in an institutional act of the club -corresponding to the Assembly Extraordinary—: the entry of presumed ultras into it. This fact, the controversy over the won elections, and other factors forced Calderón's resignation in January 2009. He was succeeded by Vicente Boluda, who organized the transition towards a return to the presidency of Florentino Pérez. Popular demand in the Madrid environment saw him as the only one capable of redirecting the course of the club.
Maximum global expansion: a universal club
Re-elected Florentino Pérez as president, he focused his tasks on cleaning up the club sportingly and socially. The incorporations of Cristiano Ronaldo —the protagonist of the largest outlay made to date by a player—, Ricardo dos Santos Kaká, Karim Benzema and Xabi Alonso, as well as returns such as Álvaro Arbeloa —previously formed in the youth academy to reinforce the presence of players after an excessive hiring of foreigners in the last decade—, they failed to make champion a team that accused an early elimination in the Champions League for the sixth consecutive time and lost the status of "seeded head" of the competition. Two emblematic players leave the club: Raúl González and José María Gutiérrez Guti, the two captains and two of the last considered to be the best players from the quarry, who offered no guarantee of improvement, at least in the short term, since their rival F. C. Barcelona was experiencing the best sporting moment in its history.
The prevailing irregularity caused a restructuring of the management areas and a firm long-term project was drawn up with the hiring of the coach José Mourinho, current European champion, who led to some of the biggest and most disputed matches that are remembered in the rivalry with the Barcelona fans, to be Real Madrid almost the only club to break them as dominators of the moment. Both teams achieved records never seen in Spain and markedly distanced themselves from the rest of the country's teams coining the term "bipartisanship" or "Scottish league", as only the two of them are the only ones dominant in local competitions.
After reinforcing the team with several signings for the future, after eighteen years he won the 2011 Copa del Rey. To further consolidate the project, the coach was given control of the entire sports field, an unprecedented event in Spain and in the club, and it was reflected in a success by breaking three unprecedented marks in Spain: the highest number of goals in a league season and in a full season, with 121 and 174 goals respectively, the thirty-second league championship with a historical record of one hundred points, and that of being the team with the most away victories with sixteen. The club also managed to reverse the trend in Europe, the main commitment after reduced credit in recent years, and came to play three semifinals followed by the Champions League for which he regained not only the status of "seeded head" but also led him to position himself as number one. At the time, the basketball section achieved the runner-up in Europe, a plot in which the club established a similar structure with Pablo Laso at the helm.
Despite the good future, the Portuguese coach did not continue at the club. The background of the coach's disagreements with the Spanish press and some players on the squad (such as Iker Casillas, who ceased to be a starter) led to his departure after an agreement with the president to the benefit of both parties. The stage closed with a total of three titles in three years as opposed to the previous seven years where nine different coaches lifted only four titles.
The circumstance of the economic movement —also occurred in English soccer— was governed under the new slogans established by the highest European soccer body of a "financial fair play", established to regulate the arrival in soccer of economic magnates who they inflated the scope even more. previous, and that continued with an exponential growth of the aforementioned "modern company soccer".
International hegemony with Cristiano Ronaldo
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Italian Carlo Ancelotti and assistant Zinedine Zidane —who was returning to the club— took over the sport. Focused on a greater emphasis on the future than on the present —notable for the arrival of young or youth soccer players— it also continued to focus on "Spanishizing" the squad, an action that began years ago. Players like Isco Alarcón, Nacho Fernández, Carlos Casemiro or Gareth Bale —all of them young and with projection— led a sports revolution in which the club obtained the highest amount of sales revenue in the entire his story.
The conquest of a new Copa del Rey title again against F. C. Barcelona, was seconded by the tenth European Cup after defeating the neighboring rival, Atlético de Madrid 4-1 after extra time, which it was reached by a goal from Sergio Ramos in the discount of regulation time. The final was the first that pitted two teams from the same city against each other and made it impossible for their greatest rival to win their first title in that competition. Cristiano Ronaldo also scored in it - who established a new record in the competition with seventeen goals scored in the same edition by a player. Months later he corroborated the success of the sports model with two new international titles and after signing the best historical streak of consecutive victories of any Spanish club with twenty-two in all official competitions. The European Super Cup and the Club World Cup, placed him as the most successful European club internationally. The basketball section also reached the Euroleague final again, however it was lost for the second time in a row, depriving the club of achieving the European double in both sections. Despite the result, the institution managed to place its two sections again at the top of the international scene.
The new UEFA regulations on the inclusion in professional teams of a minimum number of national players and trained in the lower categories of the club itself to participate in European competitions, led the club to strengthen itself in the future with the return of homegrown players such as Lucas Vázquez, Kiko Casilla, Álvaro Morata, or Marcos Llorente, and national players such as Marco Asensio, Dani Ceballos or Jesús Vallejo to face this measure. Regarding the casualties section, there were the departures of two homegrown players, that of captain Iker Casillas after twenty-five seasons as a Real Madrid player and being one of the most successful and charismatic players in white history; and that of Álvaro Arbeloa, one of the players who most publicly professed his Madridism, coming to be considered as one of the great myths of the club after twelve seasons and eight titles. Both were two of the club's international players who managed to proclaim themselves winners of the E urocopas of 2008 and 2012 and the 2010 World Cup for national teams and achieving the "triplete" with Spain.
After two seasons with Ancelotti as coach, the club decides to terminate his contract and sign Rafa Benítez as the new coach, who is quickly fired in the middle of the season for obtaining poor results and not controlling the white dressing room. Zinedine replaced him Zidane —coach of the subsidiary until then—, who managed to turn the club's football situation around by winning the eleventh European Cup after beating Atlético de Madrid again, this time decided by penalties (5-3). After once again winning the international triplet: European Cup, European Super Cup and Club World Cup, it became the most successful club in the world.
The basketball section achieved historic records in its career after winning four titles in the same season, among which the ninth European Cup finally stood out. This, the first under the current Euroleague format and after playing its third consecutive final, completed the third triple crown of its record and its eleventh national double. The repoker of titles was completed by the conquest of the FIBA Intercontinental Cup, its fifth world championship, to be the club at the same time European champion and current world champion in both disciplines, being the first time that a sports club achieves it. Subsequently, what was one of the largest section figure, Pedro Ferrándiz, was named honorary member of the entity, the highest individual distinction awarded by the club for his work for the club during his career.
During these years of Florentino Pérez's second term in office, various initiatives were worked on and managed to consolidate the club model, not only at a national or European level, but universally, a line that was historically established with the expansion of the 1950s. Thus, numerous sponsorships, signatures, tours, events, the Real Madrid Foundation and new areas of the entity, among other measures, served to increase the image of the club. Seconded by sporting successes, a line of work to strengthen itself as one of the most valued and recognized entities in the world, in addition to consolidating confidence in young footballers of great projection with a view to permanent institutional growth. During this period, the broadcast of the club's television openly and Internet, as well as brand agreements with global companies such as Microsoft or International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC), and which, among others, situaro n the club as one of the sports entities with the best market value and income in the world and the first in the football field.
The sporting dynamics, a reflection of the good health of the entity in all areas, allowed it to achieve several records to be noted. Among them, they highlighted adding eight consecutive appearances in the Champions League semifinals, a historical record for the competition, forty consecutive games without defeat in all competitions, a record in Spanish football and eighth European mark, encompassing fifteen of the aforementioned European competition that led them to reach their third final in four years (2014, 2016 and 2017), to later be the first team to defend the title under the new format with their twelfth European Cup, after winning 1-4 to Juventus Football Club, which until then had only conceded three goals during the competition in the season.
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Zidane made history by winning his second European Cup in his second year as the team's coach. In addition, this trophy also came along with the League Championship, number thirty-three, being the third double of this nature and the first since 1958, to close the season with a five-team after also raising the Spanish Super Cup, the European Super Cup and the Club World Cup. In the achievement of the domestic championship, one of the patents of the white team was reflected: not giving up until the final whistle of the match and added seventeen points and seven victories from the eighty minute into the game. In addition, the club exceeded the figure of more than eight thousand in the computation of the national competitions and nine thousand counting the international ones.
The following season, Real Madrid added to their record by winning their thirteenth European Cup, being the only team in the world to win it three consecutive times; and allowing Zidane to be the first coach to win three European Cups, in just three years. They defeated Liverpool Football Club 3-1, with two goals from Gareth Bale and one from Benzema. Cristiano Ronaldo became the club's all-time top scorer by surpassing the mark of 323 goals set by Raúl González in 2010, and being the first player in the club's history to reach and exceed 400 goals, setting the new mark at 450. goals after leaving the club at the end of the 2017-18 season with a historic career at the club. This player was one of the highest references of an economic-sports model criticized at its inception, and who led the entity to live his second best institutional stage after the one that occurred with Di Stéfano. After lifting the thirteenth European Cup, Cristiano Ronaldo decided to leave the club and Zinedine Zidane did the same, surprising the president and fans. With eight titles since his arrival as coach, at that time he became the second most successful coach in the club's history after the fourteen titles won by Miguel Muñoz, and equaling those achieved by Luis Molowny.
These outings caused the closure of the second best sports stage of the club. The club decides to sign the then Spanish coach Julen Lopetegui as the new coach for the team's next season, which provokes the anger of the Spanish Football Federation and his immediate dismissal as coach two days before the start of the 2018 Soccer World Cup. This begins the achievement of several negative records in the club's history: losing the first international final after 18 years —the European Super Cup— and the white team being 481 minutes without scoring a goal and without winning a league match after five games. Lopetegui is dismissed in the middle of the season and replaced by Santiago Solari —coach of the subsidiary and former player of the team—, who wins the seventh Club World Cup for Real Madrid and decides to rejuvenate the team by giving stripes to Marcos Llorente, Sergio Reguilón and Vinícius Júnior, to the detriment of Marcelo Vieira and Isco Alarcón, while Luka Modrić succeeded Ronaldo as the best player in the world by receiving the Ballon d'Or. Despite d Following the good results achieved, before closing the season, the white club lost three games at home in the same week and deprived them of the fight for three titles still in contention: the cup, the Champions League —where they also won their worst defeat at home-, and the league -finished with 18 defeats-, in what was his worst season in the last twenty years. After that week and discrepancies with veteran players, Solari is dismissed and Zinedine Zidane returned to office to redirect the sporting situation, after the express request of Florentino Pérez, and after not even a year had passed since the coach decided to leave the club.
Football and economic reconstruction (News)
For these last days, with Zidane's return to the team, the entity focused on a profound sports restructuring for a new season, for which it incorporated players like Luka Jović or Eden Hazard, among others The announced revolution for the new course did not take place, to end up having a team practically identical to that of past seasons with the same negative trend of results. Criticized in the media and fans for not rebuilding the starting team with new players and not having a clear idea of their game, the turning point that was the kyiv final revealed various structural and conceptual problems, beyond the commitment of some veteran players. In international competition he signed the worst start of the team in the Champions League, after not winning any of the first two games played for the first time in its history. Despite the bad omens, the team was revitalized based on a great defensive solidity —the cause of much criticism at the beginning of the season—, with key players such as Casemiro and Fede Valverde and supported by the influence in attack of Toni Kroos and Karim Benzema, who led the team to qualify for the knockout phase in Europe and place co-leader in the Spanish championship. He played the renewed Spanish Super Cup in Saudi Arabia and after getting rid of Valencia C. F. in the semifinals in one of the best games of the season, he beat Atlético de Madrid in the final in what was the seventeenth occasion in which a derby decided a title between the two. In the penalty shootout, "the whites" won the title, their eleventh number in the competition and sixty-five at the national level, and days later they managed to chain twenty consecutive games without lose that they placed him leader of the league championship.
Halfway through the season, the competitions were canceled by UEFA, the RFEF and La Liga, due to an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2, a global viral pandemic that reached Europe from Asia, causing infections, deaths and economic decline. After an improvement after months of confinement of the population to stop contagion, the government decreed that the competitions could resume their activity without an audience in the stands, so the matches were held at the Alfredo Di Stéfano Stadium with the aim of advancing the remodeling works at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. The club, plunged into an economic crisis, asked the players to reduce their salaries by 10% in order to balance the accounts for the season, which had been diminished by not having spectators in the stands. Since its restart, the team won the ten games that remained to be played in the championship and was proclaimed champion at the Alfredo Di Stéfano Stadium, for the first time in its history. The media pointed to the Belgian Thibaut Courtois as one of the key players, being the goalkeeper with the fewest goals scored in the tournament, and together with the captains Sergio Ramos and Karim Benzema as the most prominent in the team's success. It is worth noting this season the subsidiary team, Real Madrid Castilla, led by Raúl González, who was proclaimed champion of the UEFA Youth League for the first time in its history. On June 29, 2020, it was 100 years since the club received the title of "Real" from the Royal House. Former captain Iker Casillas returned to the club as deputy to the general director of the Real Madrid Foundation, after retiring after five years at Fútbol Club Porto.
The complicated economic situation of the club, due to the global pandemic, did not allow major changes in the squad compared to the previous season, facing an austere stage. As is assumed of its footballers, the team lost points, dropping out of the league championship and being at the expense of the last match of the group stage of the Champions League to determine their classification in European competitions, causing serious criticism of the team and its immediate future. The team reacted in a week with three decisive matches, against Sevilla Fútbol Club, Borussia Mönchengladbach and Club Atlético de Madrid, which resulted in qualifying for the round of 16 of the European tournament as first group — twenty-fifth time who entered the crosses phase in 25 participations—, and become co-leader of the league championship after beating Sevilla and rojiblancos, confirming a One of the essences of the club is never to give up, coming out on top when it is criticized the most. At the end of the year it was awarded the Best Club of the 21st Century by Globe Soccer, a recognition that added to those already received of the previous century by FIFA and the IFFHS. Despite the good results, which dispelled doubts, the absence for various reasons of the necessary generational change in the squad, together with the continuous injuries during the season, diminished the team's performance, which despite surprisingly reaching semifinals of the European Cup and having options to win La Liga until the last day, the team failed to win any title. Despite this, the club decided to bet on Zidane's continuity as coach, but the coach chose to terminate his contract again and be replaced by Carlo Ancelotti again, who arrived with the physical trainer Antonio Pintus —who had already been in the first Zidane's stint as coach—to reverse the large number of injuries in the team.
The team started the new season well and managed to lead the championship, with a notable performance from their forwards Karim Benzema and Vinícius Júnior, both top scorers in the tournament.
In the 2022-23 season, on matchday 16, the club plays for the first time in its history without any Spanish starter.
Success in the premiere of the women's section (Actualidad)
The club had been working for decades to expand its multi-sports nature, and in the summer of 2019 it announced its intention to merge Club Deportivo TACON by absorption, a fact approved at an extraordinary meeting in September by its members, and by the that the entity began to have a women's soccer section. Before, in their debut as rookies in the First Division, "las taconeras" played their home games at Real Madrid City, within a framework of temporary collaboration between both clubs until the definitive agreement for the 2020-21 season. The team has been reinforced with international players such as the Swedish Kosse Asllani and Sofia Jakobsson —both bronze medalists at the 2019 World Cup in France—, the already established members Malena Ortiz, Patri Carballo or Gema Prieto and promises like Lorena Navarro, María Portolés or Ariana Arias, to name a few, fought for the objective of maintaining the category and consolidating themselves in the national elite. From the beginning, the planning followed the same guidelines as the men's team of combining proven footballers with youth players, something very careful in both sections.
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Under the presidency of Ana Rossell, a great supporter of the team and main promoter of the merger agreement, they played the Colombina Cup and the prestigious Ramón de Carranza trophy —which for the first time was organized with exclusively women's matches—. In it they faced Athletic Club, the most successful club in the league championship, a competition in which they made their debut against Fútbol Club Barcelona. The match, played on September 7 at the Johan Cruyff stadium, ended with a 9-1 defeat, being the Paraguayan Jessica Martínez -same who gave the promotion to the heels-, the author of the first goal of the club in the highest category, after a pass from Jakobsson. After the "yes" of the delegates, the aforementioned entity —a member of the First Division of Spain— thus became a full-fledged part of the club in June 2020. Before, installed in Real Madrid City with an estimated budget of two and a half million in its beginning, he faced his first season in the league championship with the idea of consolidating himself. The club made its home debut in the top flight against Sporting Club de Huelva at the Ciudad Deportiva de Valdebebas with a 3-0 victory, the first in the Spanish elite. The Swedish Sofia Jakobsson was the one who scored the first goal for the club in her stadium, taking advantage of a bad clearance from the rival defense. The other goalscorers of the match were the aforementioned Jessica Martínez and Kosse Asllani, both from a pass from Jakobsson, who was the team's top assistant with three assists in the two games played, to participate in all the team's goals until the match. date.
The team continued to acclimatize to the new competition and focused on solidity and unity. Even coupling the latest additions and base fundamentals, he conceded two new defeats denoting the difficulty and work that will define the season and the objective of permanence. Despite this, he also recovered from adversity with five consecutive unbeaten days that allowed him to face the end of the first half of the championship with greater guarantees. The figure of Jakobsson —nominated for the Ballon d'Or along with his teammate Asllani— became key for the team, which placed ninth with 16 points, 4 behind decline.
In February, the women's team played for the first time in its history the Copa de la Reina, the oldest Spanish soccer competition in this category. In it they faced Rayo Vallecano from Madrid in Valdebebas in the round of 16, whom they defeated thanks to a solitary goal from Jessica Martínez, and were eliminated in the quarterfinals by Athletic Club 2-1. In the men's competitions, the pandemic caused the cancellation of the championship, finishing in tenth position and thus maintaining the category before the definitive conversion into the club's women's soccer section became effective on July 1. Numerous players of great projection in Spain joined it, with the aim of being one of the leading teams in the country as soon as possible. Maite Oroz, Teresa Abelleira, Marta Cardona or Misa Rodríguez, to name a few, joined the signings from the previous year as team leaders.
The 2020-21 season began earlier in the women's section. On July 13, just days after the section was made official, what was the first professional squad in its history was presented. It was therefore the first opportunity in which the club had two professional sections in the respective top categories of the Spanish football.
On October 4, the women's team played the first official match in its history, corresponding to the national league championship. Its first line-up was made up of Misa Rodríguez, Kenti Robles, Ivana Andrés —the club's first captain—, Babett Peter, Marta Corredera, Tere Abelleira, Aurélie Kaci, Maite Oroz, Marta Cardona, Kosse Asllani and Olga Carmona. Sofia also made their debut. Jakobson and Lorena Navarro. The match, played against Fútbol Club Barcelona at the Ciudad Deportiva de Valdebebas, ended with an unfavorable score of 0-4. Asllani scored a goal that would have been the first in the section and the momentary tie at one, but it was annulled by the refereed for an alleged foul on the rival goalkeeper. The event did occur the following day when Asllani headed in a cross from Kenti Robles to score the 0-1 match against Valencia Club de Fútbol that ended with a one-goal draw in the Ciudad Deportiva de Paterna. In the derby on October 18 against Rayo Vallecano de Madrid, they achieved the first official victory of the section by winning 3-1 at the Ciudad Deportiva de Valdebebas, and it was the first of seven victories in eight games that lifted it to the top of the standings -to second place-, within the access positions to the Champions League for the first time in its history. The Swedish Asllani was the maximum reference when scoring eight goals with she the ones that she stood as the top scorer of the championship.
The team continued with the good trend of results, with Asllani and Cardona as benchmarks, including a victory against Atlético de Madrid in the second round match. It was the first victory against "las colchoneras", by 0-1, thanks to a goal from Jakobsson and the outstanding saves by Misa Rodríguez. for one of the two remaining access places to the Champions League. Finally, after arduous days, they achieved the league runner-up and together with Levante Unión Deportiva and Barcelona fans they qualified for the first time in their history for the dispute of the highest competition mainland.
In the draw for the Champions League on August 22, round 2 of the league route, he was drawn against Manchester City Football Club, whom he faced in a double tie. His first lineup was made up of Misa Rodríguez, Kenti Robles, Ivana Andrés, Babett Peter, Lucía Rodríguez, Tere Abelleira, Aurélie Kaci, Olga Carmona, Athenea del Castillo, Esther González and Nahikari García. The first leg at the Alfredo Di Stéfano stadium ended with a 1-1 result, after the Mexican Kenti Robles scored the equalizing goal in the final moments. The second leg, played at the Academy Stadium from Manchester, ended with a 0-1 result thanks to a goal from Claudia Zornoza that qualified the club to play the first group stage of the competition in its history.
Symbols
History and evolution of the shield
The first coat of arms of 1902 has evolved in different versions to the current one, in force since 2003. It has a circular shape under the Spanish royal crown, and on it the three initials of the entity are intertwined —present since the initial format —, on a strip that crosses diagonally. Officially according to the statutes:
Article 8.- Distinctive
The Real Madrid Club of Football will use as an official color the white, holding a shield consisting of a thick circle of stroke, whose interior is crossed in diagonal sense, from left to right, and from top to bottom, by a strip, appearing inside the initial intertwined MCF and, as a complement, in the upper part of the circle and outside it, a real crown appears. The diagonal strip is purple and the circle and MCF letters in gold. The flag will be white with the Club shield in the center.
So, the main features are:
- The initials. In a circular barracks the initials are intertwined: a "M" in reference to "Madrid", an "F" in reference to "football", and a "C" in reference to "club", resulting in the denomination he coined at his foundation, Madrid Foot-ball Club. The graph was maintained from its incorporation into the shield to the present day due to the coincidence with the subsequent castellanization of "Football Club" to "Club de Fútbol". Inscribed since 1908, they form the body of the emblem, and they represent the first symbol of the club in 1902, with a marked calligraphic character of the time.
- The royal crown. In 1920, the fans of this sport and king of Spain, Alfonso XIII of Bourbon, granted the entity the title of "Real", upon request, as well as numerous societies of the country. As a symbol of distinction, and in representation of the Spanish royalty, the crown was added to the shield, which was also reflected in its denomination before the name of the club. It was years when the dedication of Pedro Parages printed a magnitude that would end up being one of his bad stamps.
- The edge. The coat of arms is bordered on a golden tone—extensible also to the initials—from the chromatic renewal produced in the 1930s.
- The cross band (the purple color). In the diagonal half of the shield appears a transversal band of marine blue, varied to this color from an initial purple after a modification of the shield in 1998 for reasons of marketing. This original color has had various interpretations about its origin, and also influenced beliefs about the identity and/or relationship of this tone with the club. Historians like Manuel Rosón refer it as indicative of the historical region of Castilla and his pendon, being this the most accepted and extended theory. However, this relationship is not recorded in the official records of the club at the time, thus being open to various interpretations. Yes, there is a first review of the transverse band, and purple in 1902.
Historian Manuel Rosón dates the origin of the purple in the first statutes: “The blouse is crossed by a broad purple band, representative of the austere color of Castilla, in which the coat of arms of Madrid is embroidered in colors”. On the constitutive board of March 1902, according to the report Herald of Madrid in its edition of the day 15, the colors were agreed to dress: “It was also discussed in the Board quoted from the ‘Madrid Foot-Ball Club’ (the one of its constitution) the color of the uniform that the ‘team’ has to take part in the contest (Concurso Madrid de Foot-ball Association), and it was agreed at first, without prejudice to the modifications that are judged accurate, that it be white trousers and shirts, stocks and cap blue and purple band Madrid. This shield was used to represent the Villa de Madrid in the Spanish Championship, called ordinary meetings, variation that alternated with the traditional shield. He looked at this blazon exceptionally by regulation until the end of the rough twenties.
To the last, in the official statutes, approved by Civil Governance in April, these were amended: “The regulatory uniform will be for ordinary matches dark, short and straight blue trousers, white blouse and dark stocks, and for extraordinary parties will be: pants and white blouse, black stockings with round and belt with national colors, completing this uniform a dark blue casket.”
In the snapshots of the above-mentioned contest, the "madrileñistas" did not carry any band (such as the blue and red covers in their training matches), circumstances that make the few black and white photographs in which some player carried a band is impossible to accurately assert their purple color, thus also open to several interpretations. Some take the path of the mentioned color to the shield in their early years, even though there are no new images that attack it, beyond hypothesis by historical correlations with the accounts of Rosón. The color historically accepted in the first shields, the navy blue, could be due to the fact that it is the tone of the ink of prints and stamps of the time, and thus came in images and documents, and therefore, so represented but without clearing the doubt.
- Perhaps as one of the most relevant questions for discerning the chronology of the entity, the purple color has a documented presence in its history: in the stadium of O'Donnell, the first of its property, it waved a teaching (if found this time, in snapshots and writings, despite the repeated documentary shortage), presented as a white cloth with a diagonal strip of left to right. This was finished in the center with the refitted shield to represent Madrid in its ordinary matches as a regional champion in the Spanish Championship.
(...) One British morning was a precursor of another afternoon that had nothing to envy in the morning. The elements caressed us with their nebulae and colds, and yet despising grievances that invited us to stay in comfortable and warm places of heating, a multitude of young ladies, throwing the inclemences of the temperature—fashioned bells—invading the field of purple and white colors and, piercing the barandilla of the preferred reserve of partners,Extract from the chronicle of the Regional Championship against the Racing of Madrid. Revista Madrid-Sport7 December 1916.
(...) Ruda has been the struggle, multiple setbacks, sensitive the casualties; but whatever he wants, the result has been favorable, and by congratulating us of it we send to the champions of Castile an affectionate handshake, and united to him, a vehement desire that reality precisely cut off their efforts by giving them the title of champions of Spain. Once we have fulfilled the primary duty that prompted us to take the pen, we must examine, even if very lightly, the evolution of the season in relation to the "once" representative of the white and purple flag. Let's start with the house...Extract from a summary of the season. Revista Madrid-Sport. May 3, 1917.
- The appearance of the strip, which was believed to have been introduced after the establishment of the republican regime in April 1931, was demented by new investigations that testify that it has existed since the mid-ten years on the flag, and from the 1920s on the shield. Its oldest version dates back to 1925, not knowing the exact date of the significant change in the emblem.
- Historical developments. From the initial calligraphics of 1902 to the latest version of 2003 the changes made have not meant abrupt alterations, focused on maintaining the essence of those first designs. In the period 1900 to the officialization, there is no symbol of the club, with the obvious exception of the necessary clothing.
- The first emblem had a very simple design consisting of the interlacing of the three initials of the name on the white shirt. This was interspersed by norms of the time with another round in which the two barracks and the tablecloth of the villa of Madrid were registered, which used by regulations as regional champion and representative of the city in the official matches against other sports societies, that is, the Spanish Championship. Located on the left side of the chest, they were replaced as agreed until 1930, when the club's shield became the only one that would appear in the uniform.
- His first variant occurred in 1908, when the interwoven letters adopted a more stylized form and were inscribed in a circle. This design was influenced by the Modern Foot-Ball Club, an entity that absorbed in 1904 and was briefly known as Madrid-Moderno Foot-Ball Club. This design lasted until 1920, the date of the following update following the letter of the monarch Alfonso XIII, which gave him the real title, graphically represented with the crown, while the initials were stylized. In turn, for the official parties and with the regulations still in force, the adapted city shield was also added the royal crown and was surrounded by a laurel crown.
- Around 1925, the inhabited band, foreseeably in honour of Castile—theory previously exposed without being able to verify its certainty as of 2022. This, erroneously extended, could come from the changes made by the Second Republic to the national teaching (changing the lower representative strip of Castile by a dwelling), which made the color to be attributed, and which lasted in time fallaciously as documentations indicate that the tonality was really charmesi. Nevertheless, it led to the understanding of the addition of the band as a reflection of the republican establishment in April 1931, until recent studies showed that it has a presence in the shield since the twenties. The change that did bring such a regime—in addition to a new polychrome—was the suppression of any alusive symbol to royalty, so that the club lost the crown that was awarded to it years ago.
- Once the Civil War ended, there was a new change in 1940 when the crown was recovered, keeping the chrome and abode. Highlights in this a more golden predominant tone to the detriment of the blue first. It was with this shield with which the club reached its greatest sporting successes, and remained until the end of the nineties, date of the most controversial modification made so far, when one of its most traditional signs of identity, the cross-sectional band, became of a marine blue color. Ranked as more in line with the period for marketing reasons, despite not being resolved in the statutes, it was maintained and confirmed after the last redesign dated in 2003, in its more corporate profile.
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Anthem
In 1903, the agronomist Luis María de Segovia dedicated a pasodoble to the club in what could be considered the first unofficial hymn of the club.
The official anthem of the club, sung by José de Aguilar and heard at every game in the stadium, took shape on a train that made the Aranjuez-Madrid route. In it were the musician and composer Marino García and his wife, Antonio Villena Sánchez and maestro Indalecio Cisneros, author of the original music and lyrics with the help of the aforementioned personalities related to the club. In some paper napkins from the La Rana Verde restaurant, the first notes and chords of what was finally the anthem, released in 1952 coinciding with the entity's Golden Jubilee, were made.
The recording was made at Discos Columbia with the arrangements and direction of Cisneros. President Santiago Bernabéu attended the recording in person and in addition to José de Aguilar, thirty-two leading figures in music of the time took part, some of whom stood out for being conservatory professors or members of the National Orchestra of Spain. Among them was the violinist Enrique García, who was the father of the conductor Enrique García Asensio.
On the occasion of the centenary of the club in 2002, José Cano composed a commemorative anthem, sung by the tenor Plácido Domingo together with a choir of 82 people. Despite the fact that the new anthem was only scheduled to appear during the acts of the centenary in the year of celebration and as a companion to the first, it is still being heard in the stadium in alternation with the traditional one.
On the occasion of winning the tenth European Football Cup, the singer Nadir Khayat, better known by his stage name RedOne and with lyrics by Manuel Jabois, composed a commemorative hymn entitled "Hala Madrid and nothing else". On the occasion of the eleventh European Cup, the music was covered, sung by Plácido Domingo, under the direction of RedOne.
Clothing
Real Madrid has always dressed completely in white with the exception of a few accessories in the uniform for a few years.
The origin of the Madrid uniform arises in line with the origin of the implantation of the new sport, football. in underwear, shirt and white pants. To differentiate themselves, they used colored bands across their chests that logically came off during the game. This led the different clubs to look for new uniforms, and the Madrid Foot-Ball Club claimed for itself the use of a totally white one as it appears in its founding statutes.
At that time it could be said that the club had an alternative uniform, not imperative at the time, but necessary today, consisting of the variation of the shorts, blue, and that was used according to of the nature of the match to be played, data also reflected in the statutes.
Save the brief color variation in 1925 in imitation of the Corinthian Football Club as the most significant change in the history of the kit —consisting of a white shirt in an ecru hue, and black shorts and socks and that after a series of sporting mishaps was pointed out by the members of the club as a bearer of a bad omen -, the most significant change did not take place until 1955, the year in which the stockings also became white. In this way, the Madrid uniform reached its white color in all its clothing. It was precisely with this uniform when the club achieved its greatest successes, especially in international competitions, and it remained unchanged until the eighties; From then on, advertising and sponsors began to settle in the football world and occupy space in kits.
Since the agreement with Adidas in 1998, it has been adorned with the three characteristic bands of the sports firm, and the sponsorship of Fly Emirates, since 2013. The novelties compared to the previous season are the color complementary to white for the kit, pink —in honor of the new women's team—, once again placing the details of the sports sponsor on the sides. The typography of the numbers also changed, with a more vintage layout and rounded dark blue tone.
The second and third kits varied according to the conditions of the national or continental competition. One, with a soft purple shirt, pants and socks with details in dark blue, and another, which is usually a bet by the German multinational, is dark gray with a floral print design on its shirt in different shades of gray clear with different gradation, complemented by details in pink. The making of the third kit is in recent years the one that has given rise to the biggest and most risky changes for marketing reasons.
In addition, the shirts include the emblems of the competitions that take place. On the right sleeve he wears the LaLiga logo, which is replaced for European competition matches. On these, the UEFA Champions League logo is displayed on the right sleeve along with the number of titles won, which replaces the old emblem on the left sleeve with the silhouette of the trophy.
     First |    (See evolution) |      Actual |
Infrastructure
 | For more details, see Real Madrid Club Facilities |
Stadium
Despite the almost absolute lack of fields properly equipped for soccer practice in Spain at the time the club was founded, the team played its matches on grounds in the most charismatic districts of the Madrid landscape such as Moncloa, or Salamanca.
After the importance that the new sport acquired and the followers that began to agglomerate in the first decade of the XX century, several football teams began to build or acquire fields with a greater capacity to accommodate more spectators and thus increase popularity and income. This is the case of the Madrid club, which after renting some land inaugurated its first stadium in 1912, the O'Donnell Stadium, in which various members of the club collaborated to adapt it.
In 1923, the president of the Santiago Bernabéu club acquired some land in Chamartín de la Rosa, a municipality adjacent to Madrid, to build a new stadium that would be exclusively owned by the club. Initially, the name "Parque de Sports del Real Madrid F.C." As a name for the new venue, it was finally baptized, officially, as "Campo del Real Madrid Club de Fútbol". However, it was always popularly known as "Estadio de Chamartín", being the first stadium owned by the club, thanks to which the club saw a significant increase in its coffers. from the old O'Donnell field.
Currently, and since 1947, it has played its home matches at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium —popularly known at its founding as New Chamartín Stadium and renamed in memory of the club's former president—, the which has a capacity of 81,044 spectators, the third largest capacity in Europe and which reached a capacity of 120,000 spectators before being subjected to UEFA regulations on capacity, at which time it was exceeded solely by the old Wembley Stadium.
It was inaugurated on December 14, 1947 with a match against the Portuguese Clube de Futebol Os Belenenses. The venue then had a capacity of 75,000 spectators, reaching 120,000 years later after the numerous renovations to which it was subjected and its name officially being the Real Madrid Club de Fútbol Stadium.
The stadium, one of the largest in Europe, saw its capacity drastically reduced to the current 81,044 spectators, due to UEFA safety regulations, since all attendees must have their own seat, thus eliminating standing stands, which were located in the third amphitheatre, commonly called the "chicken coop", and in the lower stands. Despite this, it still continues to be one of the largest and best football stadiums, becoming classified as an Elite Stadium by UEFA in 2007.
Sports facilities
The officially named Ciudad Real Madrid is a sports complex where the residences of players and the training camps of the different soccer categories are located, as well as the club's radio and television headquarters. It is located in the Valdebebas Park, in the north of Madrid, very close to the Madrid-Barajas airport. It was inaugurated in 2005 to replace the old Sports City of Paseo de la Castellana, after a reclassification of the land owned by the club in an operation together with the Madrid City Council.
It has an area of 1,200,000 m², of which some 300,000 have been developed so far. The complex includes medical and training facilities for the first teams, both men's and women's, and the lower soccer sections, as well as residences and twelve playing fields, including the Alfredo Di Stéfano Stadium where both the first subsidiary team, Real Madrid Castilla Club de Fútbol, and the women's team play their games. The rest of the subsidiaries, male and female, play their meetings in the annexed fields of the complex, as well as the training sessions of each one of them.
Club details
- For statistical details of the club see Real Madrid Club statistics
Denominations
During its history, the entity has seen how its name varied due to various circumstances up to the current Real Madrid Club de Fútbol, in force since 1941. The club was founded under the name of Nueva Sociedad de Fútbol until it was regularized one year later as (Society) Madrid Foot-ball Club, and was formally made official in 1902.
The following are the different denominations that the club has had during its history:
- New Foot-ball Society: (1900-01) Referred as such prior to its regularization.
- (Society) Madrid Foot-ball Club: (1901-04) Regularization of the club.
- Madrid-Moderno Foot-ball Club: (1904-04) Fusion with the Modern Foot-Ball Club.
- Madrid Foot-ball Club: (1904-20) The "Modern" rating falls into disuse, returning to its original name.
- Real Madrid Football Club: (1920-31) He is added the title of "Real" given by Monarch Alfonso XIII of Spain.
- Madrid Football Club: (1931-40) The Second Spanish Republic is proclaimed so that all monarchical symbol or allusion is eliminated.
- Real Madrid Football Club: (1940-41) After the establishment of the Spanish State, monarchical allusions are restored.
- Real Madrid Club of Football: (1941-Act.) In the same way there was a Castroization of the Anglicians adopting the club a year later.
Partnership Agreements
Throughout its history, the club has maintained various agreements with other clubs to promote institutional growth. The most significant is the one maintained with the Plus Ultra Sports Association under the premise of a subsidiary club. In the same way, several training clubs or amateurs from the Community of Madrid and Spain maintain similar collaboration agreements or conventions, where there is reciprocal sports and economic aid.
Recently, the people of Madrid also signed agreements with foreign clubs such as the Royal Standard de Liège, in 2008 for the joint training of soccer players, or the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, in 2012, which favored sports relations and between both entities. In the same way, in 2021, he signed an agreement with the S. P. A. L. in order to help the growth of the Italian club, make visits to the Madrid facilities and have access to young promises.
Honours of Prizes
| For more details, consult Palmarés del Real Madrid Club of Football |
Real Madrid C. F. has accumulated numerous national and international trophies in its one hundred and twenty years of history. Among them, fourteen European Cups, two UEFA Cups, five European Super Cups, two Latin Cups, two Small World Cups, one Ibero-American Cup, three Intercontinental Cups and four Club World Cups at the international level stand out for importance; and thirty-five Leagues, nineteen Spanish Cups, twelve Spanish Super Cups, one League Cup, one Eva Duarte Cup, five Joint Trophies, eighteen Regional Championships and four Regional Cups in the national championships.
Considered by FIFA as the best club of the XX century, it is also one of the five clubs that owns the Cup of Europe in property - and the only one to possess the first original trophy in property, awarded by UEFA for being the most successful at the time of the trophy's remodeling - which gives him the right to wear on the left sleeve of his uniform the multiple champion badge of the competition. In it, he has faced one hundred and nine different rivals in the fifty-three editions played in what is considered the highest European competition at club level, where he is the most successful and its historical leader.
In his country he owns five Spanish First Division trophies for having won the competition three consecutive times or five alternate times, and two Copa del Rey trophies, the first for the same reason and the second for the name change of the competition. The people of Madrid have played uninterruptedly since the Primera División was created in 1929, without ever having been relegated, a merit that they share with Athletic Club and Fútbol Club Barcelona.
It was considered by the International Federation of Football History and Statistics (IFFHS) as the best club in the world in the years 2000, 2002, 2014 and 2017, in addition to being the first club included by the International Football Hall of Champions (IFHOC) —official FIFA collaborating institution— in the soccer hall of fame, thanks above all to the aforementioned continental successes.
In terms of matches without losing, the club boasts the best streaks in Spanish soccer. Between 2016 and 2017 the club achieved a sequence of forty consecutive games undefeated in all competitions, which means the best record in the history of its country, fourth best in all of Europe, and fifth in the world, and it remains five matches in the record of Građanski Nogometni Klub Dinamo Zagreb established in 2015. Regarding consecutive victories, it is with twenty-two the twelfth best mark established by a club in the world, while referring to matches in the league championship in its own stadium, was between 1957 and 1965 —a period of eight years— unbeaten to add a total of 121 games without losing. Likewise, the club holds the Spanish record converting goals in official matches consecutively, ranking third in the world along with Santos Futebol Club with 73 consecutive matches, 11 less than Fußball-Club Bayern München and 23 less than the world record held by Club Atlético River Plate.
Note: in bold current competitions. Indicated the tournament record
- National Tournaments (68)
 National competition
| Titles | Subcamponatos | |
|---|---|---|---|
| First Division of Spain | 35 | 1932, 1933, 1954, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1972, 1975, 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1995, 1997, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2012, 2017, 2020, 2022. | 1929, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1942, 1945, 1959, 1960, 1966, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1992, 1993, 1999, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2021. (24) |
| Spanish Cup Championship | 19 | 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1917, 1934, 1936, 1946, 1947, 1962, 1970, 1974, 1975, 1980, 1982, 1989, 1993, 2014. | 1903, 1916, 1918, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1933, 1940, 1943, 1957-58, 1959-60, 1960-61, 1967-68, 1979, 1983, 1990, 1992, 2002, 2004, 2013. (20) |
| Supercopa de España | 12 | 1988, 1989, 1990, 1993, 1997, 2001, 2003, 2008, 2012, 2017, 2020, 2022. | 1982, 1995, 2007, 2011, 2014, 2023. (6) |
| League Cup | 1 | 1985. | 1983. (1) |
| Eva Duarte Cup | 1 | 1947. | |
- International Tournaments (31)
.svg){kind=small} International competition
| Titles | Subcamponatos | |
|---|---|---|---|
| FIFA Century Club | 1 | Century xx. | |
| Club World Cup | 4 | 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018. | |
| Intercontinental Cup | 3 | 1960, 1998, 2002. | 1966, 2000. (2) |
| Champions League | 14 | 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1966, 1998, 2000, 2002, 2014, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2022. | 1962, 1964, 1981. (3) |
| European Super Cup | 5 | 2002, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2022. | 1998, 2000, 2018. (3) |
| League Europe | 2 | 1985, 1986. | |
| Latin Cup | 2 | 1955, 1957. | |
| Ibero-American Cup | 1 | 1994. | |
| Coup Europe | - | 1971, 1983. (2) | |
| Small World Cup | 2 * | 1952, 1956. | 1963. (1) |
(*) Some clubs include it in their own personal record; however, without being official by any continental or global estate.
IFFHS Europe and 20th Century Club and IFFHS Club of the Year in 2000, 2002, 2014, 2017.
- Regional tournaments (27)
 Regional competition
| Titles | Subcamponatos | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Madrid / Centre Championship | 18 | 19031905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1913, 1916, 1917, 1918, 1920, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1926, 1927, 1929, 1930, 1931. | 1903, 1911, 1919, 1925, 1928. (5) |
| Mancommon Trophy | 5 | 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936. | 1940. (1) |
| Copa Federation Centre | 4 | 1923, 1928, 1943, 1945. | 1941. (1) |
On the other hand, the Madrid 2012 Trophy (counted in friendly tournaments) was a friendly football competition to give impetus to the candidacy of the city of Madrid to award the 2012 Olympic Games. Promoted by initiative of the Madrid City Council, with the support of the city's sports bodies and the Madrid Football Federation, and considered the successor competition to regional competitions between Madrid clubs, despite having only two editions. It was conquered by Real Madrid in the 2002 edition, and was runner-up in the 2003 edition.
Trajectory
| For more details, see Trayectoria del Real Madrid Club of Football and Statistics del Real Madrid Club of Football |
The club is one of the only three that has always played in the Primera División —the highest club competition in Spain— since it was founded in the 1928-29 season, making a total of ninety-two appearances. It occupies first place in the classification among the sixty-three historical participants, as well as being the most successful with thirty-five titles. His worst performance was recorded in the 1947-48 season when he finished in eleventh place.
In Regarding the international scene, the club was one of the clubs that participated in the first edition of the European Cup —current Champions League (en. Champions League) and the most prestigious club competition in Europe—, having played it since then a total of fifty-three seasons with absence in fifteen editions; It is, therefore, the club with the most presences. In them he added a total of fourteen titles that place him as the best team in the competition among its 531 historical participants.
In the rest of the national official competitions, he has made a total of one hundred and thirty-two appearances —highlighting one hundred and nine appearances in the Copa del Rey, the second most important competition in Spain, out of one hundred and eighteen possible— for thirty-five absences in any of them; and thirty-two appearances in the rest of official international competitions for two absences in the season of UEFA competitions. Among them, nine stand out in the UEFA Cup / Europa League and four in the extinct European Cup Winners' Cup.
Note: In bold active competitions.
Sources: Professional Football League (LFP) - UEFA - FIFA Archived June 16, 2018 at Wayback Machine. - CIHEFE - BDFutbol |  FIFA Trophy that credits the club as the Best Club of the World (twentieth century). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
- Evolution
Note: the 1936-37, 1937-38 and 1938-39 seasons were not contested due to the Civil War.
■1.a Division
(Pyramidal construction of leagues in Spain)Sports organization chart
- For a complete detail of the current season, see Season 2022-23 of Real Madrid Football Club
Players
During the entity's more than 115 years, more than 1,200 footballers have worn the club's shirt. Among them, some of those considered the best players of their time and in the history of football have played. Recognized for their extensive track record both at club and international team level, players of Argentine nationality are the most represented —with the exception of Spaniards— with a total of twenty-nine footballers. In total, more than two hundred and forty foreign players have defended the white shirt since Arthur Johnson did so in the club's first official match against another company.
The Spanish-Argentine Alfredo Di Stéfano and the Spanish-Hungarian Ferenc Puskás were included by the IFHOC in the soccer hall of fame in their first gala —where the club was also included for its special relevance—, and were the first two players to form part of the select history, and to which the Brazilian Waldir Pereira Didí was later added before the IFHOC-FIFA project was interrupted. The project, dedicated to preserving the memory of relevant characters in history of soccer, it was resumed in 2011 in Mexico with the approval of FIFA under the name of the International Soccer Hall of Fame. Sánchez, Ricardo Zamora, Emilio Butragueño, Santiago Bernabéu, Paco Gento, Raymond Kopa and Didí —as "deans" or of special importance—, Vicente del Bosque, Luís Figo, Ronaldo Nazário, Jorge Valdano, Raúl González, Fabio Cannavaro and Ro berto Carlos as the seventeen ex-members of the club to be included, being the most represented club.
In addition, the players who spent the longest years under the club's discipline stand out in Madrid history, the Cantabrian Paco Gento and the Galician Miguel Ángel González with a total of eighteen seasons each in the first team and Gento was also the player with the most He achieved official titles as a club player with a total of twenty-three, a milestone that was matched, and later surpassed, by Marcelo Vieira in 2022. A notable honor is achieved by Miguel Porlán Chendo from Murcia and Manolo Sanchís from Madrid as only footballers in Madrid history to develop their entire professional career at the club, thus forming part of the so-called One Club Man.
In terms of the number of games and goals, the Madrid player Raúl González leads the list with a record of 741 matches -sixteen more than Iker Casillas- and he led the list of all-time scorers with 323 -fifteen ahead of Di Stéfano, a player who changed the history of the club-, before of being surpassed by Cristiano Ronaldo in the 2015-16 season. It is worth noting Roberto Carlos, who was the foreigner with the most games played with the white shirt with 527, until being surpassed by Karim Benzema in 2020.
Among the club's currently active players, the Frenchman Karim Benzema is the player with the most appearances and seasons with 621 appearances and fourteen seasons —after the previous 2021 records by Sevillian Sergio Ramos, who is also the player who he has more caps with Spain with a total of 178. The top scorer is the aforementioned Benzema with 333 goals in just fourteen years, an average of more than twenty-five goals per season.
| Maximum gorillas | More contested parties | More contested seasons | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Cristiano Ronaldo | 450 goals | 1. | Raúl González | 741 matches | 1. | Paco Gento / Michelangelo | 18 years |
| 2. | Karim Benzema | 333 goals | 2. | Iker Casillas | 725 matches | 2. | Carlos Alonso Santillana / Manolo Sanchís | 17 years |
| 3. | Raúl González | 323 goals | 3. | Manolo Sanchís | 710 matches | 3. | José Martínez Pirri / José Antonio Camacho / Raúl González / Iker Casillas / Sergio Ramos / Marcelo Vieira | 16 years |
| 4. | Alfredo Di Stéfano | 308 goals | 4. | Sergio Ramos | 671 matches | 4. | Mariano García Remón / Miguel Porlán Chendo / José María Gutiérrez Guti | 15 years |
| 5. | Carlos Alonso Santillana | 290 goals | 5. | Carlos Alonso Santillana | 645 matches | 5. | Felix Quesada / Amancio Amaro / Fernando Hierro / Karim Benzema | 14 years |
| See complete list | See complete list | |||||||
Note: In bold active players at the club. Seasons recorded with first equipment tab.
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Some generations of the club's footballers deserve to be highlighted, such as "Madrid de Di Stéfano" —a team that managed to win five consecutive European Cups, also being known by the pseudonym "Madrid of the five European Cups", and by the that the club is known by the name of "Viking"—; the "Madrid de los yeyé" —a team made up exclusively of Spanish players that won the club's sixth European Cup—, the "Madrid de los García" —runner-up team in the European Cup that managed to reach the final of the maximum continental tournament after fifteen years of absence— the “Madrid de la Quinta del Buitre” —a team that won five consecutive Leagues and two UEFA Cups—, the so-called “Madrid de los Galacticos” —a team that won five titles, including a European Cup, a European Super Cup and an Intercontinental Cup - or more recently the two stages of "Zidane's Madrid", which won eleven titles in five years, specifically, three consecutive European Cups, two European Super Cups and two Club World Cups, two Spanish League and two Spanish Super Cup. Individually, there were seven players who, playing under the discipline of the club, were designated as the best player in the world.
All the players in the current squad have been capped at least once in some category throughout their football career. Among them, the most represented at the date of the last calls correspond to the absolute Spanish team with four representatives, adding a total of seven footballers among all the Spanish categories among the eleven Spaniards usually called up. Among them, the aforementioned stands out Sergio Ramos as the outfield player who has worn the Spanish national team shirt the most times in its history with 180, surpassing goalkeeper Iker Casillas (167) overall in 2019, a former club player for sixteen seasons.
Cristiano Ronaldo also stands out as the top scorer in the history of the national teams, and as a member of the Century Club for having played a hundred or more matches with his team, the same circumstance that Sergio Ramos, Raúl González, Iker Casillas and Xabi Alonso also achieved with the Spanish team, the Romanian Gică Hagi, the Danish Michael Laudrup, the Brazilians Roberto Carlos and Robinho de Souza, the also Portuguese Luís Figo and Képler Lima Pepe, the Englishman David Beckham, the Frenchman Zinedine Zidane, the Italian Fabio Cannavaro, the Cameroonians Geremi Njitap and Samuel Eto'o, the Dutch Wesley Sneijder and Rafael van der Vaart, the Mexican Javier Hernández Chicharito, the Argentinean Ángel di María, the Croatian Luka Modrić and the Belgian Eden Hazard
The origin of the players indicates the previous club that owned the rights of the player, despite the fact that he comes from another club on loan, in case he already belongs to Real Madrid.
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- Players with dorsals above 25 are, for all purposes, players from Real Madrid Castilla Club of Football and as such, will be able to match matches with the first and second team. As LFP standards require, the first-staff players will have to carry the dorsals from 1 to 25. From the 26th they will be players of the subsidiary team.
- According to UEFA regulations, each club can only have a maximum of three extra-community players, who occupy a foreign position, while a canteran must remain at least three years of training age at the club (15-21 years) to be considered as such.
Technical staff
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After the remodeling of the club's sports organization chart carried out in 2012, the plot of the technical staff of the first team was affected. In it, the figure of the coach came to be called a sports manager, varying his functions and taking charge of the entire sports section of the soccer section, from the planning and development of the soccer players to the field work, known as a coach or coach..
After the departure of the Frenchman Zinedine Zidane, the Italian Carlo Ancelotti returned to the position, who assumed the same functions regarding the issues of the first team, similar to English soccer. Previously, Ancelotti was coach between 2013 and 2015, with Zidane as assistant coach.
Real Madrid Football Club has had a total of forty-seven coaches during its history, in which, due to its international impact, it has come to have the service of multiple coaches of different nationalities, and they are those of Spanish nationality the most numerous with a total of twenty-two. The first coach-player who carried out teaching tasks was the British Arthur Johnson, in 1910, years after the origins of the club in 1900, since until then all decisions were made by the president and the board of directors, but with the As time went by, soccer was acquiring more and more technical and tactical details, it became essential to create a figure in charge of such tasks. Such has been the evolution of tactics and the demands of this sport, that the use of the figure of a second coach that complements the work of the main «manager» has now become popular. The first coach, official for all purposes, was Juanito Cárcer from Malaga, the first in the country.
Among all the coaches the first team has had, the Spanish Miguel Muñoz stands out, who was in charge for a total of fifteen seasons in which he recorded 605 games and in which he won fourteen official titles for the club —342 games and 3 titles more than the second in both cases, the Frenchman Zinedine Zidane. In terms of performance, it was the Italian Carlo Ancelotti who accumulated the best numbers, with a 73.47% win rate in 196 games, surpassing the 71.91% obtained by the Portuguese José Mourinho.
Currently, the position of assistant or assistant coach is held by the Italian Davide Ancelotti.
Directive
Since the first official president of the club, Juan Padrós, in 1902, a total of eighteen presidents have passed through the highest office of the entity, including the second terms of Adolfo Meléndez and Florentino Pérez, and the presidency of Julián Palacios, who He appears in the statutes as the first president in the history of the club between the years 1900-02, when the entity was created without being legalized even after the split that occurred in the (Society) Sky Foot-ball, predecessor club of the (Society) Madrid Football Club.
Among them, the presidency of Santiago Bernabéu stood out, the club's eleventh president, who held office for thirty-five years. He was undoubtedly the most important in the history of the club due to his charisma, sporting achievements —both as a footballer and as a manager—, and he became the person most responsible for the growth of the company both at an institutional and sporting level.
Under his tenure, he not only promoted the club itself, but football in Spain and Europe, and was one of those responsible for and promoters of the creation of various competitions in this and other sports with which he thus favored their development.
Following the last elections for the presidency and the board of directors, in which there was a single candidacy, the different positions at the club for the 2017-18 season were held by the same managers as during the two previous terms with the man from Madrid Florentino Pérez at the helm, and the soccer sports directions fell to coach Zinedine Zidane and Ramón Martínez on a provisional basis, and basketball to Juan Carlos Sánchez and Alberto Herreros.
Florentino lives his fifth stage at the helm of the club, in what is his third term after being re-elected in the 2017-18 season, continuing with the solid project at a sporting and social level in which the club lived one of its eras winners.
Under his umbrella, the club won six League championships, two Copas del Rey, six Spanish Super Cups, six European Cups, five European Super Cups, one Intercontinental Cup and four Club World Cups for a total of thirty titles in eighteen years —two of those achieved under the mandate of Santiago Bernabéu—, in addition to two Euroleagues, one Intercontinental Cup, seven Leagues, six Copas del Rey and eight Spanish Super Cups in basketball, which gives a total of fifty and four titles for the entity. But without a doubt, where his presidencies had the greatest impact was in the economic aspect. Under his management, the club became the richest sports club in the world, obtaining annual profits of more than 600 million euros, which allowed the club to end the historic debt it had been carrying since the first half of the last century, as well as to qualitatively expand the image of the club.
Lower Categories
| For more details, see Real Madrid Club Football Base |
The club's youth system, known since the beginning of the XXI century as "The Factory", has always been one of the most fruitful in Spain, and it is one of the most important and most successful, and has been considered on multiple occasions as the best youth academy for soccer players in Europe. Its objective is to supply —since its restructuring in 1950 — From footballers with a great future to the first team, although there were already training teams from the beginning of the entity. It covers sections from the age of youngest to youth before accessing the club's affiliate teams, Real Madrid Castilla C. F., and Real Madrid C. F. "C" —This was refounded in 2022. The aforementioned youth squad joined the men's section in 2020, and the basketball section, as the current sections of the club to be European champions.
Prestigious and renowned players such as Santiago Bernabéu, Juan Monjardín, Perico Escobal, Enrique Mateos, Luis Aragonés, Manuel Velázquez, Goyo Benito, Ramón Grosso, Míchel González, Emilio Butragueño, Miguel Porlán Chendo, Manolo Sanchís, have passed through it. Rafael Martín Vázquez, Chucho Solana, Raúl González, José María Gutiérrez Guti, Iker Casillas, Álvaro Arbeloa or Juan Mata among many others. Such is the magnitude that many teams in the First and Second Division of Spain have been reinforced with numerous footballers trained at the Madrid club. Its subsidiary is also, by results, the best of the country's subsidiary teams, while As of 2020, it is the Spanish club that has the most footballers trained in its youth academy in the major European leagues with 63, and sixth in the continental computation, behind the homegrown players of Partizan Belgrade, Ajax Amsterdam, Dinamo Zagreb, Dynamo de kyiv and Shakhtar Donetsk. Of these, 43 play in one of what is considered the "big five leagues" in Europe, more than those formed by any other entity.
In 2022 its training center was the second most profitable in the world in financial terms after the Sport Lisboa e Benfica academy. Since 2015, the transfers of its youth players have reported a total of 330 million euros to the club. The headquarters of these grassroots football facilities are located in the Ciudad Deportiva de Valdebebas, inaugurated in 2005, called Ciudad Real Madrid.
Affiliate Teams
Real Madrid Castilla Club de Fútbol, better known simply as Castilla, is the first subsidiary of the club for dependent legal purposes since 1972, the date on which it acquired the federative rights of the Plus Ultra Sports Group, and since In the early 1940s, it served as a subsidiary club through different agreements. Previously, these agreements were maintained with other clubs in the capital, in addition to having the club itself lower sections or an amateur club for train the players before their promotion to the first team —later called Real Madrid Club de Fútbol "C" as its second subsidiary. This disappeared in 2015, but after the restructuring of the national categories carried out by the Royal Spanish Football Federation, the club recovered it in 2022.
Castilla, as the last of the formative clubs of the white academy before the first team, plays in the First Federation —a new category replacing the old Second Division "B"—, and next in the rank to the silver category of the Second Division, in which he played for the last time in the 2013-14 season. It has been proclaimed champion once in the thirty-three seasons in which it has participated, which makes it the best subsidiary team of Spanish clubs in terms of titles, performance and seasons played. It has also won other eleven league championships in lower divisions.
It is also the only affiliate that has the honor of having played in a top-level European competition, by qualifying for the 1980-81 European Cup Winners' Cup due to the Copa del Rey final played the previous year in which he faced his parent team, Real Madrid C. F., already qualified for the European Cup. The feat could not and will not be matched by any other Spanish affiliate by changing the regulations of the Royal Spanish Football Federation and UEFA on the competition rules regarding affiliate teams.
In reference to these, it should be noted that in contrast to other European leagues, the subsidiaries of Spain play the same divisional system as any other club, that is, regardless of their dependence on a parent club, a circumstance that also occurs in Germany and France. In England or Italy, to cite two examples, the youth teams play their own exclusive leagues. This issue is causing debate and a possible integration into an independent league has been studied for years.
Other sports sections
| For more details, see Sports Sections of the Real Madrid Club of Football |
Real Madrid was founded as a soccer club, but soon became a multi-sports club. Since then and during the more than one hundred and twenty years of the club's history, it had numerous sections including chess, men's and women's athletics, women's basketball, men's and women's handball, baseball, bowling, boxing, cycling, fencing, futsal, men's and women's artistic gymnastics and sports, weightlifting, ice hockey, grass, skates and indoor, Greco-Roman wrestling, men's and women's figure skating on ice, paddle ball and punta basket, petanque, rowing, table tennis or ping -men's and women's pong, archery or archery and men's and women's volleyball. Its sections achieved various achievements during its existence, reaching a great reception and impact within the club.
Some of them were practiced in the annexes of the «Chamartín stadium», and to allow the practice of others, a well-known multi-sports complex was built with the name of Ciudad Deportiva del Real Madrid Club de Fútbol at the beginning of the sixties. Among them, the volleyball section stands out especially as it is one of the longest-lived and most successful, and remained for thirty years, even after its disappearance, as the most successful team in Spanish volleyball with 19 titles between leagues and cups. reflecting his dominance in the 1970s of Spanish volleyball.
However, due to the economic demands to maintain the sections, the club had to gradually withdraw them to dedicate more efforts to soccer and men's basketball, disciplines that were more prolific in terms of titles and earnings, sporadically adding a indoor soccer team through the veterans team. In addition, the Real Madrid Foundation offers young adolescent women the practice of basketball and an adapted and wheelchair school.
In the first decades of the XXI century, an attempt was made to recover some of the aforementioned sections, being that of handball, the of rugby or futsal, which were closest to re-existing; as well as creating a women's soccer team, a project in which the club stated in 2017 that it had been working for years. Finally, in 2019 it was presented a proposed merger by absorption of Club Deportivo TACON to materialize in 2020, which was approved in September by the club's members.
Later, in 2015, what was the second subsidiary team, Real Madrid Club de Fútbol "C", joined the list of missing persons. This was characterized by being the team that served as a platform for promotion between the lower categories and the professional teams of Real Madrid.
Started as an amateur club, under the name of Real Madrid Aficionados in the fifties, it played in the Third Division until the moment of its dissolution, this being the fourth category of football in Spain. As a second branch condition, the highest category that the team could play in was the Second Division "B" having participated in it a total of five seasons, reaping his best performance in the 2012-13 season in which he finished in fifth position.
Different from the character with which it was started, since the 1990s it was made up mainly of youth soccer players from the Madrid youth academy. Among their greatest achievements was reaching the round of 16 of the Copa del Rey in the 1986-87 season, in which they were eliminated by Atlético de Madrid —later runner-up in the edition—. Additionally, it is the team that has the most trophies in the Spanish Amateur Championships with a total of eight.
Various news reported in 2022 that the club would be evaluating the possibility of refounding the team for the formation of the youth players, prior to moving to the affiliate team, a member of the RFEF First Division. Finally, he obtained a place in the RFEF Third Division after a affiliate agreement with the Club Deportivo Elemental Madrid, which cushioned the abrupt generational change between categories after their restructuring by the RFEF in 2021.
Men's basketball section
The Madrid club has a basketball section called Real Madrid Basketball. This was created in 1931 by Ángel Cabrera under the presidency of Rafael Sánchez-Guerra. It is the most successful club in the history of FIBA basketball, and the only one together with Club Joventut Badalona that has always played in the highest category of Spanish basketball. It is, in turn, the most successful in Europe and international competitions worldwide.
The growth and successes of the section come largely thanks to the management carried out by Raimundo Saporta, a great promoter of this sport in Spain and Europe who worked for the club while combining his position in the Spanish Basketball Federation He was the right hand of former president Santiago Bernabéu, under whose management the best years of the entity were experienced, both at a sporting and institutional level in the recent history of the entity. Under the decisions of both leaders, the section reaped a total of 53 titles.
Women's soccer team
After numerous speculations with the creation of a women's team by the media, the club finally reported in 2017 that the club is working to create a women's soccer section from the training cycle to the territorial category of Primera de Fans, which would correspond as a starting point for the future first team. The information, from the president, confirmed these assumptions as well as the option of a possible purchase of a federation license that would lead to the foundation of the Madrid women's team, specified in clubs such as the TACON Sports Club or the Madrid Women's Football Club.
At the end of the 2018-19 season, the club confirmed the merger by absorption of C. D. TACON of the Spanish First Division, effective July 1, 2020, and it was ratified by the partners just a few months later. In its first season, 2020-21, it finished as runner-up in the League Championship, which allowed it to play just one year after its founding in the Champions League, the highest competition at European level and in which it reached the quarterfinals.
Veteran Squad
The Association of Former Players of Real Madrid Club de Fútbol, was born as a section of Real Madrid Club de Fútbol veterans, playing a series of friendly matches and 11-a-side soccer tournaments, a modality that continues to be maintained today under its name of Real Madrid Legends, winning various trophies (along with a-7 football and futsal in various friendly matches and charity events promoted by the Real Madrid Foundation). Since 2010, he has organized the Corazón Classic Match, where he plays every year for charity together with other historical teams of European clubs to raise funds for the work of the foundation.
Previously, an indoor soccer section was formalized in 2008 to create the National Indoor Soccer League Championship, which disappeared after various editions.
Social area and sociocultural dimension
46% of soccer fans surveyed as of 2018 in Spain by the market statistics and opinion portal Statista point to it as the most popular club, while internationally it is also one of the most recognized entities in the world with an estimated 500 million followers in 2020. It is the football club that arouses the most interest in digital media worldwide, among which it is also the sports institution with largest number of followers with a total of 344 million. Among them stands out its main website, which since 2016 is the most viewed soccer page in the world, and is available in eight languages. It is also the club with the most monthly searches on Google, with an average of almost 20 million visits.
In search of further development and consolidation at a digital level, in 2020 it created Real Madrid Next, the brand under which the club's innovation projects will be developed, with the collaboration of startups and companies that seek to improve the performance, benefits and economic-sports strength of the entity, as well as enhance the assets of its members. Focused on six areas of work: e-health, performance, fan engagement, generation of audiovisual content, cybersecurity and technological and social infrastructures, it is one more step in the increasingly growing digital world, an area in which electronic sports or esports have stood out in recent years.
At the end of the 2020-21 financial year, the membership was made up of 91,701 members, and 2,452 supporters clubs present in 92 countries.
Hobby
Since its foundation, the entity has been owned by its members, being one of the four professional clubs in Spain whose legal entity is not that of Sociedad Anónima Deportiva (S. A. D.). As of 2021, the club's social mass is made up of a total of 93,920 members. Among these, approximately two thousand have the status of delegate members, who are chosen from among their own members of the club as representatives of the rest in the general assemblies and therefore have decision-making rights in the aforementioned meetings. Its function is to issue judgments or votes on the future of the entity in addition to approving the economic accounts. In the 2000s, registration to become a member, which required a studied admission process, came to a standstill due to the high number of applications, making it impossible for the club to attend to all of them and mainly due to the insufficient capacity of the stadium to assign them a seat. own. Instead, he created the Madrid supporter's card, which, although it does not grant the rights of membership in an assembly, grants certain privileges and binds its holders to the club. The number of cards at the end of 2018 is more than 1,000,000 according to the Madrid website.
Committee members, whose condition requires the endorsement of three other members, are elected every four years. If the number of compromising partners presented does not cover the places, a raffle is carried out among all the partners until it is complete, in the same way that if the number presented is greater than the places, they are chosen by lottery from among those presented.
The social mass of the entity grew in line with the institutional growth. Thus, ten years after its foundation, the club already had approximately 450 members who filled the stands of the old O'Donnell Stadium, and among whom were also the managers, who, as dictated by the The club's institutional bylaws must meet the membership requirement.
Education, health and involvement with development
Real Madrid C.F. offers academic training through its School of University Studies Real Madrid-Universidad Europea de Madrid, as well as the SEK Educational Institution. The first of them offers university and postgraduate studies, and the second acts as a teaching center for the club's homegrown players, both of which are private and open to anyone who requests it according to the requirements of the centers.
The Real Madrid School of University Studies is present in eleven countries, and further expansion is planned in Europe and Asia. In it, the Real Madrid Chair is also taught to develop cooperation between the world of education and sport through research and teaching activities and studies; and a Department of Professional Careers.
The club also has an alliance with the medical assistance company Sanitas, in charge of managing the club's medical services for all its sports sections.
The Real Madrid Foundation is the instrument through which the entity makes its corporate social responsibility effective and develops its humanitarian, social and educational purposes. On an annual basis, the club proceeds to make a donation to the Foundation for the development of its activities, whose foundational objective is to promote the values inherent in the practice of sports and the promotion of this as an educational instrument capable of contributing to the integral development of the personality. of those who practice it. It develops its activity programs around five large areas, such as the promotion of sports, sports training for the development of values, social projects, international cooperation and institutional activities, as well as the documentation center.
Its more than 200 social sports schools in more than sixty countries receive social work in more than 60,000 disadvantaged beneficiaries in areas such as hospitals, shelters, prisons, centers for the elderly, or sports campuses, among others. Since 2012, the foundation has had the help of the Madridista Volunteer Office, with more than 250 volunteers who altruistically help the social work.
The Real Madrid Foundation manages, among other activities, the Club's Documentation Center, as well as the Corazón Classic Match, an annual meeting between world teams of veterans —which has been attended by veterans from A.C. Milan, F.C. Bayern München or Manchester United F.C. among others— whose profits go to the Foundation's Africa Project. This contributes to respect for Human Rights, peace and the construction of citizenship on this continent as well as the fight against poverty and the social exclusion of youth in Africa. Senegal, Mozambique, Burundi, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda among others are already benefiting from this project. Since its creation, it has received numerous recognitions and awards for its social, cultural and humanitarian work in favor of development.
The Foundation offers a quarterly magazine called ReALMAdrid where the different activities and projects carried out are reflected and reported, as well as a more visual support through the Annual Report.
The club in the media
The club is one of the teams that receives the most coverage in the Spanish media, with special emphasis on its matches against direct rivals, such as "el Clásico" against F. C. Barcelona. The event brings together journalists and media from dozens of countries, and hundreds of correspondents.
The club's daily information is covered by its own international television channel, Real Madrid TV HD. It deals with the broadcasts of its institutional acts, assemblies, press conferences, current news and gatherings, as well as broadcasting live or delayed matches of its sports teams, through its website and since April 28, 2016 in open nationwide on digital terrestrial television in Spain. It completes its programming grid with social and sports documentaries, as well as entertainment broadcasts or feature films. Prior to its establishment, the magazine Hala Madrid, distributed among all the members and holders of the Madrid card since its inauguration in September 1950, was in charge of said function. 2020 is the main means of communication between the club and its members, and it has an infant edition dedicated to children called Hala Madrid Júnior.
Through new technologies, increasingly present in both popular culture and sports, the club has a web page, expanded for information with platforms on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, the main communication and interactivity tools outside the usual written or digital press. In them it is the sports institution worldwide with the largest number of followers with a total of 344 million.
The club in popular culture
The history of the club has been reflected several times in the world of cinema through different points of view. Films such as Saeta Rubia, La batalla del domingo, Real, la película or Goal II: Living the Dream narrate from a cinematographic history the scope, repercussion and projection of the club in the world. For the editions of the films, we had the collaboration of the club, and even some of its members.
The club is also referenced in the anime Captain Tsubasa: Road to 2002, the 2001 adaptation of the Japanese manga Captain Tsubasa (キャプテン翼 Kyaputen Tsubasa?), as the antagonistic club of the plot written by Yōichi Takahashi. Referred to as Bernabéu Club de Fútbol (for legal reasons the clubs do not appear with their true identities) players of the time appear such as captain Blueno known as "the crack annuler" (Fernando Hierro), Robecaro (Roberto Carlos), Callusias (Iker Casillas), Raíl (Raúl González), Luís Fago (Luís Figo) or Gati (Guti) to name a few, joined by other fictitious figures from the series itself such as Natureza, who is speculated to be the "King of football", star of the Brazilian national team, and the eternal rival of Tsubasa Ōzora, who stars in the series. In the same way, the club is also shown in the following plot lines from 2005, Captain Tsubasa Golden-23.
The aforementioned manga was brought to videogames, and the club had a presence in the Captain Tsubasa: Dream Team by launching Transfer World Football Legends: Los Galacticos, a specific event within the game itself in which you could acquire some of the players of the Madrid team. In the same way, in other sagas or soccer games, championed by FIFA from EA Sports - Electronic Arts or Pro Evolution Soccer from Konami, the club is present, and the aforementioned EA Sports even signed as an official partner of the club, from 2016 to 2025.
Rivalries
| For more details, consult Rivalidades del Real Madrid Club of Football |
In terms of sports, the Madrid team maintains a rivalry with several clubs. In Spain, he met Athletic Club, with whom he had intense duels in the early years of Spanish football for being at that time two of the best teams that existed and with whom he played several Cup finals; with Fútbol Club Barcelona, a rivalry with worldwide significance in the matches known as "el clásico", and which dates back to 1916. Against Atlético de Madrid they dispute the "Madrid derby", this being their greatest historical rivalry, which has repositioned itself as such in recent times and whose first duel was in 1906.
As for Europe, their greatest rivalry has been with Bayern Munich of Germany since the 1970s due to their controversial clashes in the Champions League, or with Associazione Calcio Milan of Italy with which they maintain the dispute sports for being the most successful international team on the continent, although this rivalry with the Italian club has almost completely diminished, due to the failure of the rossonero team to qualify for European competitions in recent years.
Other attempts of lesser repercussion were punctually against Real Sporting de Gijón, with Club Atlético Osasuna, or with Valencia Club de Fútbol. However, none of them achieved greater repercussion on the national scene than the that he maintains with the aforementioned Bilbao, Barcelona and Atlético fans and with the Bavarians and Milan fans internationally, these five clubs being the ones with the most notable sporting matches against the Madrid team.
Economic-financial analysis
The most valuable club in the world
When Florentino Pérez became president in 2000, the club was close to bankruptcy. Thus, under the premises of necessity and control, planning was structured to improve the club's accounts without neglecting the successes sports. Reflected in the era of "los galacticos", a revolution in football using business principles to get the club out of the economic crisis by hiring the best players of the moment and taking advantage of the marketing they generated, he obtained some quick results that, however, ended up collapsing in the sports field, not without great successes. The four famous players hired —Luís Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo Nazário and David Beckham— cost close to 200 million euros, but these expenses quickly became in enormous monetary benefits that led the institution to receive nearly 400 million euros per year at the end of Florentino Pérez's first term in 2006. The management not only led the entity to position itself as the richest and most prestigious football club in the world, but to save it economically. Almost two decades later it was learned that Florentino Pérez himself personally guaranteed the pressing debt with 147 million euros that allowed, together with the management carried out, to clean up the entity's accounts, a fact that mainly allowed the club to continue to be one of its partners. It was a measure similar to those adopted in the past by Pedro Parages, Adolfo Meléndez or Santiago Bernabéu, when in moments of equal delicacy of the entity they personally endorsed or made deep efforts for its revival. Despite this, the subsequent directives once again led the club to a pressing financial crisis that had to be reversed again, with the second presidential election of Florentino Pérez in 2009.
The good economic health of the club since then is reflected in a negative net debt since 2016, after gradually reducing year by year from the 327 million euros that were on the date of the arrival of the Madrid president., its EBIDITA ratio stands at a value of 0.0 since 2016, which denotes its unbeatable solvency and value of maximum credit quality for financial entities. All this implies, not a debt but a net liquidity position, or that any other type of debt of the club (gross) is assumable in solvency parameters thanks to its assets and treasury. Said assets are approximately 533 million euros -after applying income of 653 million in its last year-, and allows the club to comfortably meet all its payment commitments as well as have flexibility to make decisions about possible new investments. Since the 2019-20 financial year, the covid-19 viral pandemic caused a drop in revenue of approximately 300 million, while debt was contracted for the first time in five years due to the negative economic repercussion it produced. A crude reflection of the current delicate situation in football, before which the club he knew how to overcome with a careful strategy, while the main entities in the world accumulated losses. This deficit, despite being assumable by the club's resources with a debt/equity ratio of 0.1 points below the maximum solvency and financial autonomy that marks the zero value, it had to be alleviated with new salary adjustments and new austerity measures until the economic recovery. This line will be essential in future years despite having contained it thanks to the careful plan.
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This management was due to the covid-19 pandemic, whose effects on citizens had repercussions on the economies, for which the club applied a stage of austerity with extraordinary measures to avoid having losses. It can be seen how in In the last fiscal years, the covid-19 had an impact on a brake on income, around 300 million, which the club was able to counteract after reducing expenses to present a positive balance in both years, still enjoying a good treasury (which decreased due to premiums and pandemic).
Expenses are obtained by subtracting income (before disposal of fixed assets) from the operating result before depreciation or EBITIDA (before taxes).
The economic future of the club, also due to the high expenses involved, logically continues to depend on providing more income. These, in the words of the president of the club, are difficult to increase in the current context. Ordinary income grew at the lowest rate in the last decade, with a year-on-year rise of just 0.9% with traces of not giving much more of itself (although it is necessary to contemplate the crisis caused by the pandemic that placed the budget for 2021 at values of five years ago and whose real effects are yet to be seen). The management assumes that there are two important items in which little can affect: the television rights of LaLiga and the market pool of UEFA, two of the main sources of income, and that is why what the club has bet on is a major remodeling of the Santiago Bernabéu stadium that will provide the club with an additional 150 million euros each year. Another measure was to restructure the commercial department, which should have had a significant impact with the latest successes sports —especially the three consecutive Champions Leagues—, and where, however, income from sponsorship and licenses barely rose 0.4%.
Referring to the room for manoeuvre, most First Division teams have a high level of indebtedness due to the weight of external financing in their financial structure. Club Atlético de Madrid is the team that presents, by far, the highest level of indebtedness, followed by Fútbol Club Barcelona and Valencia Club de Fútbol, and they must try not to increase their debt in the coming years. On the opposite side, the only teams that show an adequate level of capitalization are Real Madrid, Sevilla Fútbol Club and Villarreal Club de Fútbol, since their own funds represent close to 40% of the financial structure, so in the In the coming years, they could consider increasing their level of indebtedness to try to favor their financial profitability, such as the remodeling of the stadium in the case of the Madridistas. Said operation is within economic viability despite the effects of the pandemic as some favorable grace conditions in three years, that is, without making any payment until 2023, the date on which it will already be inaugurated and its income will not only cover these expenses but will also report high benefits. That is why the operation as a whole it does not affect per se the rest of the day-to-day balance sheet operations of the club.
Influence with other clubs
Corinthian Football Club
During the 1925-26 season, the first and only major change in the club's clothing took place. Patricio Escobal and Félix Quesada —members of the first team— decided after a trip to England to propose a change in the colors of the club's uniform for one similar to the one used by the famous Corinthian Football Club. This London amateur team was world famous for their elegant and sporty game and their total rejection of professionalism, in addition to the great potential they displayed despite this. Not in vain, they were capable of defeating great professional teams without any being able to compare to them. His uniform consisted of a raw silk button-down shirt and black pants.
The soccer players wanted those to be the new colors of the Madrid team in admiration and recognition of the English —whose exploits also led to the creation of the Brazilian Sport Club Corinthians Paulista—, and they did so for a season despite the displeasure of the President Pedro Parages. However, an event led to the replacement of the new clothing. The club was thrashed by Football Club Barcelona 1-5 at the Chamartín Stadium in a Cup match. In the second leg they lost again, 3-0, so emboldened by the resounding failure, Parages entered the changing room of Les Corts, blaming the defeat on the bad luck of the "Corinthian" uniforms and ordered the person in charge of the material to get rid of them. Madrid Football Club thus recovered its traditional white clothing and forgot about black pants.
Leeds United Association Football Club
Just as the people of Madrid changed their clothing for a year in favor of the English Corinthian Football Club out of admiration for another club, in England something similar happened with the clothing of the Madrid club. The Leeds United Association Football Club changed the usual color of his uniform in the 1960s by the usual color of the Spanish after the one known as "Di Stéfano's Madrid" won the 1959-60 European Cup, winning 7-3 at Eintracht Frankfurt Fußball.
That game at Hampden Park, Glasgow, was witnessed in the stands by Don Revie, manager of the English team. The impact of the Madrid game was such that he decided that the Elland Road team would abandon their uniform with a blue and yellow shirt for a total white one to give his team a new winning path, as he stated.
"We've been wearing blue and yellow. What have we won since? Nothing. From now on, this team stops being a loser, because I train it. And I'm not a loser. You know what team has won more titles in the world? Real Madrid. Do you know what color Real Madrid saw? White. Well, from this very moment, this team will play white. It will be an unequivocal sign that this Leeds is, from this moment on, a winner".Don Revie. March 1961. Leeds.
As a curiosity to note that since then Leeds became one of the best teams in England, winning numerous titles until the 1980s, changing the history of the leodensians.
Royal Salt Lake
Real Salt Lake, an American Major League Soccer team, was created in 2004 by Dave Checketts in Salt Lake City and as a declared follower of the Madrid club he put the word "Real" before the game. name of the city after receiving its consent. As a result of this, both entities closed a collaboration agreement for a period of ten years in the creation of schools, the dissemination of television content or clashes in friendlies such as the one played in the summer of 2006. For the colors of the uniform, however, they stipulated using the same as those of the Spanish team, although they did adopt white for their alternate uniform.
Similarly and as they belong to the same entity, Utah Soccer Holdings, the women's Utah Royals Football Club and the Real Monarchs of the USL Championship adopted also to its name the word "Real" in its English translation. Their second uniforms are just as white as that of the Spanish club.
Real Potosi Club
In this case, it was Club Real Potosí of the Bolivian First Division that adopted not only colors but emblems and denominations of the Madrid club to form its own. In this case, taking purple as the main color, and white as secondary, the opposite of Madrid.
In 1994, the Academia de Fútbol Real Potosí club merged with the former club of Banco Minero (BAMIN) for which it was renamed Bamin Real Potosí, the name Bamin disappearing in 1994 because its president was presumably a fan of the Spanish club, so that it would be more similar. The club disputes the Bolivian Professional Soccer League.
Real Aurelio Football Academy
Similarly, the Real Aurelio Football Academy in Rome took the emblem and name of the club to devise its own when it was created in the summer of 2015. The training school, linked to the Associazione Calcistica Perugia Calcio, took she the red color for her kit, being one of the main schools in her area in the field of training.
TACON Sports Club and Madrid Women's Football Club
Club Deportivo TACON was a women's soccer club in Madrid, founded by Ana Rossell, which in 2020 became the women's section of the Madrid club. Due to the fact that to date the entity did not have a team female, Rossell founded it in Madrid as an alternative for those Madrid soccer players who wanted to play in the capital, and with the hope of one day being able to formalize the section in the club of which she was a fan. Thus, she took the white color as a reference for the kit in the likeness of Real Madrid. It was the same reason that led to the foundation of the Madrid Women's Soccer Club by Alfredo Ulloa, who also in her case, her shield was also designed in the likeness of the white club.
Annexes
| Related entities | Statistical data and background | Personalities and history | Infrastructure |
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