Five hundred million, thought Perez, might not be wildly off the mark. Not at all. So what was that again? Twenty-five million euros plus a maximum of 10m more? That’s right, said Sanchez, calming down. The pair had calculated, before Sanchez set off for Sardinia, that they might, if they were lucky, get away with paying ¤40m for Beckham. They were prepared to pay ¤50m if absolutely necessary. And if it really came to it, more. So it wasn’t that difficult a decision to decide to go for Manchester United’s offer. Sanchez knew, once he had got over his momentary panic, that his president would come around. But it was still with relief that he heard Perez say at the other end of the phone line the sweet, magic words, “All right, then. We’ll have to take that.”
And that, almost, was that. The date was Friday, June 13, 2003. What remained was to deal with the player and his agent. But Perez and Sanchez had established lines of communication with them already, and they were confident they’d wrap things up fairly briskly. What was certain, at any rate, was that the hard part was over. Manchester United had been persuaded, like Shakespeare’s Othello, to throw away a pearl richer than all their tribe. And more easily and for much less than Perez would have imagined possible when he first formed the idea, nearly a year earlier, of adding Beckham to his collection of superstars. Which was why, a couple of hours after that heated conversation with Sanchez, Perez surprised his right-hand man by calling him on his mobile telephone, catching him as he was about to board his private plane back to Madrid. He did not say hello. He did not introduce himself. He just said two words: “Congratulations, sunshine!”
SO WHY had it all been so easy? Why so much cheaper than Figo, Zidane and Ronaldo? Six months after Beckham joined, I put those questions separately to four of the top Real Madrid executives. Their first response was, in each case, to shrug. They hadn’t believed it at the time. They couldn’t quite fully believe it now. But once they began examining the possible factors involved, all roads led to one conclusion: that while the first three galacticos had had to be prised away from their clubs in operations requiring all of Perez’s tenacity and accumulated business cunning, as well as lots of cash, Beckham had been almost given away. Manchester United’s position had been, “Here, take him! We don’t want him any more.” It had not been Kenyon’s position. Through little fault of his own, he found himself in a predicament in which he had little choice but to hand over Beckham for a song, or at least for much less than he had originally estimated the selling price would be.
Kenyon, while nominally chief executive, was not the real power at United. Somebody else had the power to trump his initiatives, exercising almost godlike authority over the club’s affairs. Somebody else who was Real Madrid’s secret weapon in the Beckham transfer, their unwitting ally, without whom United had no intention whatsoever of letting Beckham go. In the late summer of 2002, when Beckham’s last season at Manchester United began, neither the United fans nor the players nor the directors of what was then the world’s richest club, had any inkling that the England captain would ever leave them. They would have reacted to the suggestion with protective rage. All, that is, except Perez’s ally, the most powerful individual in Manchester United’s history, the club’s manager, living legend and knight of the realm, Sir Alex Ferguson.
Kenyon knew Beckham was worth more to the club in marketing terms than all the rest of the United players combined. Kenyon did not want him to leave. In his heart of hearts, he would rather have let Ferguson go than Beckham. Kenyon was privately of the opinion that Ferguson had got far too big for his boots, that he had come to see himself as bigger not just than the players but than the club itself. But the successes of the previous decade had made Ferguson’s position unassailable among the fans.
So how did Perez set about capturing Beckham? At first, by doing nothing. Like a hunter in the forest, an image he liked, he hid in the undergrowth and lay in wait, eyes peeled, ears alert, believing that sooner or later, if he showed enough perseverance and patience, opportunity would come his way. He suspected from the start that his best chance of landing Beckham would come from what he described as the looming bust-up between Beckham and Ferguson. But it was not until February and the Flying Boot incident that Perez became aware of how favourably things were turning out for him. He also knew that the more badly, and more visibly, United wanted to let go of Beckham, the lower the price would be. A seller who makes no secret of his desire to sell is every buyer’s dream.
BECKHAM is a football nut. Given how cruelly short a player’s professional life is, he was not going to resign himself to spending his few remaining years in misery, cringing in the shadow of the bully who had made him great. Obviously what to do next was the main subject of conversation at the time with his agent, Tony Stephens. (The Manchester United boss could never stand the sight of Stephens — a grave, soft-spoken man utterly different in style from Ferguson — of whose relationship with Beckham he was wary and jealous.) Real Madrid were the club whom Stephens’s business brain would have judged to be best suited to enhance the Beckham brand. It was crystal clear what Stephens had to do: get in touch, via the agents’ bush telegraph, with Real Madrid. So what did the message from the Beckham camp to the Bernabeu say? Simply this: might Real be interested at some point in signing David Beckham? Back came the unequivocal reply: Yes.
Perez quietly thrilled to the news. The ice had been broken, the final chapter of Beckham’s career at Manchester United had begun to be written, and if things went according to past form, Perez would once again get his man. The two big transfers of the previous two years had also been initiated by the players themselves. Zidane and Ronaldo, again through the agents’ network, had been the ones to make the first move. That is the way Real Madrid like it. For reasons of dignity and pride, but also because it makes good business sense. The more a player wants to come to your club, and your club alone, the lower the price you’re going to pay.
Perez understood this better than anybody. He is a proud Spaniard and an even more proud Real Madrid fan. He venerates the club over which he presides, like a cardinal his cathedral. That is why it is important to him that prospective players show the club its due respect, why they should — in an attitude of proper deference — make the first contact. But he is dreamy only up to a point. He possesses in abundance what the American author Saul Bellow describes as “ the cheating imagination of the successful businessman”. He schemes, he plots and he is invariably several moves ahead of his rivals. There were still a couple of months to go, but already he had the endgame in mind. On May 4 Manchester United won the English League championship. Four days later, Perez confided that the crunch was coming: “Ferguson wants him to go, Beckham wants to go, we would like to have him, and so, therefore, let’s make everybody happy.” Sanchez, his eyes glowing, told me that same day why landing Beckham was an absolute must. “Today Real Madrid and Manchester United represent the South and the North, the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon,” he said. “To get Beckham would allow us to cross over to the North, to get the Anglo-Saxons too. Real Madrid would be the United Nations.”
On May 19, at a meeting of the G14 clubs in Manchester, Sanchez asked Kenyon’s permission to talk to Beckham’s agent. Kenyon thought about it for a moment, then said yes. That was the green light Sanchez had been waiting for. He travelled to Nice, where Stephens was with the Beckham family. His purpose was to establish whether Beckham did indeed wish to come to Real Madrid; whether there was any doubt in his mind. Stephens told him what he wanted to hear: after Manchester United, the only possible club for Beckham had to be Real Madrid. Anything else would be a come-down.
Then Sanchez put the basic outlines of a financial offer on the table. Before going any further, there were two things Beckham should know, he said. The salary he would receive at Real would be non-negotiable. He would be paid no more, no less, than the other four galacticos, Ronaldo, Zidane, Figo and Raul — which was ¤5.5m a year. And, like the other galacticos, he would have to cede 50% of his image rights — meaning money he made from endorsing brand names such as Pepsi-Cola and adidas — to the club.
It was a delicate moment for Sanchez. Scary. He knew this was an awful lot to ask of a one-man multinational such as Beckham. Kenyon had, in fact, warned him in a private chat that there was no way Beckham would accept such a deal. But whatever Beckham said, Real Madrid were not going to make an exception for him; they were not going to risk the whole galactico edifice coming down for one man. To Sanchez’s boundless relief and surprise, Stephens told him not to worry. “
