I AM sharing a dinner table with Florentino Perez, the Real Madrid president and world football transfer record-holder who last week bought two of the three best players in the game, Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaká, for a combined £136m. The table is big enough for 12 but it’s just the two of us in a private room inside an austerely luxurious Madrid restaurant that serves traditional Spanish food. Perez does not look at his menu or the wine list, which he asks the waiter to pass to me.

“Choose one you like,” he says. He doesn’t touch alcohol. When the waiter takes our order I opt for a seafood starter and, for the main dish, bull’s tail in red wine sauce. Perez asks for a couple of fried eggs and chips and, on a plate on the side, a tomato. Raw, unadorned.

He is a billionaire, 397 on the latest Forbes rich list, but does not live like one. I have had dinner with him many times, alone and in company, since 2003 and he always sticks to the same frugal fare. Actually, not always. Fried eggs and chips are his staple. The tomato this time around was a wild indulgence.

This particular encounter took place early this year, before his return to the Real Madrid presidency, when he was occupying himself merely with running ACS, a construction, engineering and energy conglomerate that employs 150,000, operates in 50 countries and had revenues last year of just over €4 billion, a third of that profit. Middle-sized, middle-height, middle-aged, he was wearing his usual blue shirt, tie and dark grey suit, though he has been known in moments of sartorial rashness to switch to a blue blazer.

We talked football most of the time, though he did mention in passing that his company had recently sealed a deal to build a tunnel for the New York subway system, between Manhattan and Queens. I left the dinner convinced, in a way I had not been after various meetings and phone conversations over the previous three years, that he was going to return — and with a bang — to the Real Madrid presidency he had left, somewhat with his tail between his legs, in 2006.

Back he came two weeks ago, announcing at his inaugural ceremony: “I feel capable of almost anything.” He was not exaggerating. Perez has shaken up Spanish football with the capture of Ronaldo and Kaká, shifting the centre of gravity of the world game away from England to Spain. Whether the “spectacular” team (his adjective) he is building at Real, and on which he will spend close to €300m by the time the summer is done, will end up winning anything next season is anybody’s guess. In the 2003-04 season he assembled a Real team that contained the concentrated cream of the world’s talent — the galactico side of Zidane, Figo, Roberto Carlos, Beckham and the Brazilian Ronaldo — but they imploded in April, having given the impression until then that every available trophy was theirs for the taking.

Yet, beyond results, that team captured the football world’s imagination like no other had done before in the globalised TV age. They travelled to China and 40,000 paid to watch them train. By the time Perez is done he will probably have acquired the services of Valencia’s David Villa, possibly the world’s most lethal striker, and Liverpool’s elegant midfielder, Xabi Alonso. When galacticos mark II go to China they will drive the natives wild too.

The reason the football world’s eyes will turn to Spain now is that this is where the action will be, where the fun will be had, irrespective of who wins the Champions League. Real will be a huge draw card and so will Barcelona, who last season played the most attractive football anywhere and possess, in Leo Messi, the third in the trinity of current greats, a player for whom Perez would have paid more than he has for Cristiano Ronaldo, had the Argentinian not made plain his intention not to leave Barça. The Spanish national side, first in the Fifa world rankings, also play great football and, as the champions of Europe, are many people’s favourites to lift the World Cup in South Africa.

But Real are generating all the headlines, as well as no small measure of indignation from football puritans everywhere outraged at Perez’s financial profligacy. Why should a man who is puritanical in his habits — his one nod to extravagance is a yacht named after his wife of 30 years, Pitina, on whom he dotes — become such a lavish libertine when he puts on his presidential Real Madrid hat? Decipher that conundrum and you have the answer to the question so many people have been asking: is it not economic madness to spend such vast amounts (£80m on Ronaldo alone, plus £9m for his agent, according to reliable Spanish press reports) at a time of global recession or, indeed, at any time at all?

No it is not, says Perez, because, in a favourite saying of his, “the most expensive things are the cheapest”. He likes to illustrate what he means using the example of a piece of heavy machinery of the type he needs in his construction business. If he buys the most expensive and best tunnel digger on the market it will last a long time and work quickly and efficiently. It will be better value than a cheaper, less reliable machine.

The same logic lies behind Perez’s acquisition of players who are the best in the business and whose name recognition matches or exceeds those of the biggest Hollywood stars and the most celebrated national leaders. In short, Perez will tell you, to buy Ronaldo is the opposite of throwing money away; it is a solid gold investment.

Perez is baffled that nobody else seems to quite get it. For he has already shown everybody how it’s done. Between him taking over as Real president in 2000 and leaving in 2006, the club’s income increased from €100m a year to €300m; in the club wealth standings, Real rose from 18th to first. Perez could not have done it without his galacticos, without breaking the world transfer record with the purchase of Zidane.