Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez has outlined plans to sell 5% of the club through a newly created subsidiary, as part of a revolutionary initiative to attract external investors for the first time.
At the club’s annual meeting on Sunday (23), Pérez told some of the 100,000 members that he would allow a vote on the plan at an extraordinary meeting in the near future, stating that the new investors should “help us protect our assets from external attacks.”
The plan represents the biggest change of ownership in the 123-year history of Real, a football club with a huge global fan base, hundreds of millions of social media followers and revenue of €1.1 billion last year, the most of any team in the world.
This comes at a time when financial investment in football continues to increase. English Premier League clubs have outspent their Spanish rivals on new players this summer, while American investment group Apollo agreed a deal this month to buy a majority stake in Real’s local rivals Atletico Madrid.
Pérez stated that the club will need to create a new subsidiary that will be owned by current members and will sell a stake of “around 5%” to one or more investors.
Seeking to reassure potential concerns, he said that external investors’ stakes will be “symbolic” and “limited”, adding that the new shareholders must “respect our values, contribute to the growth of the club and help us protect our assets from external attacks”.
If the new shareholders wish to sell their shares, Real Madrid will always have the right of preference in the purchase, he stated.
“We need to prevent ownership and control of the club’s destiny from falling into the hands of a few individuals, as has already happened in other clubs,” said Pérez.
He said the corporate changes would “formally recognize” the 100,000 existing members as the “true owners” of the club, cementing that number and also assigning a monetary value to membership.
“Having a Real Madrid membership card will no longer be just a sentimental thing,” said Pérez. “It will also have real, tangible value.”
The billionaire businessman said that when he joined the club in 2000, it was practically bankrupt and “I even had to personally guarantee €147 million (R$911.3 million) from my own assets to save it”.
With the planned ownership changes, “no one will be able to dilute our status as owners or alter the balance that guarantees Real Madrid’s independence and stability,” Pérez said.
