Real Madrid And The Problem With Rich Kids

Surely, there are reasons Real Madrid fired Carlo Ancelotti. President Florentino Pérez just couldn't recall any of them on Tuesday, when he fielded questions from the press about why the Italian wouldn't be continuing with the club next season. Asked what Ancelotti had done to deserve a dismissal, Pérez responded "I don't know," as if the decision was something that had happened all of a sudden, beyond his control. The lights went out at the Bernabéu for 15 seconds, and when they flickered back on—huh, weird—Madrid didn't have a manager anymore. The world's largest club works in mysterious ways.

To be fair to Pérez, who is undeserving of fair treatment, he said "I don't know" more as a way to deflect a question than anything else. When's the last time you saw management receive a why did you fire the guy? inquiry and say anything like well, he was an inagile tactician, for one thing, and a lot of us upstairs found him personally unpleasant. Shitcannings are never explained beyond we just felt a change had to be made. That is never the reason, of course, but it's the reason the public is given.

Except at Real Madrid, it seems like they might actually make changes based entirely on whim. Ancelotti is the ninth casualty of Pérez's 14-year tenure in charge of the capital club. (That's over two terms: one from 2000 to 2006, and a second from 2009 until the present.) All things considered, Ancelotti was fortunate to last two full seasons. He outlasted Carlos Queiroz, José Antonio Camacho, Mariano Garcia-Remón, Vanderlei Luxemburgo, Juan Ramón López Caro, and Manuel Pellegrini. But just as time devours all, Pérez devours managers, and with great rapidity.

For what it's worth, Ancelotti was a near-perfect fit in Madrid. He has a quiet charisma that the stars who populate the squad respected; he dealt with the media crush that threatens to overwhelm every Madrid manager with utter calmness; and while he wasn't tactically imaginative, his willingness to let the team's talent speak for itself was both humble and wise. Ronaldo wanted him to stick around, and Ronaldo can be thoroughbred-prickly with his coaches. It takes, above all, a cool head to manage Madrid, given the sort of pressure to win multiple titles each season. Ancelotti had such a head, and the club lopped it off anyway.

This all bodes exceedingly well for presumptive new manager Rafa Benítez, who is not at all thin-skinned, vain, transparently insecure, or eminently mockable. Benítez, who has has had an ugly falling out with nearly every owner he's ever worked for, will no doubt thrive in an environment where his every decision is questioned by millions of fans and journalists, and where players, because they're better-compensated and less dispensable than he, will ignore his instructions if they disagree with his thinking.

Rafa styles himself a strategic genius and a smooth handler of talent and journalists, and he is perhaps kind of one of those things. But if Rafa's history is any indication, there's a strong chance this relationship will end badly and swiftly. If Pérez's history is any indication—well, same outcome.

It's fun to have fun with Madrid because, under Pérez especially, they conduct themselves like fatuous rich folks from a scrapped Mark Twain tale that the author deemed too on-the-nose to publish. Real Madrid compete credibly for La Liga, the Champions League, and the Copa del Rey every season. They spend heedlessly each summer, filling gaps in their lineup with the very best players available, and then, seemingly just for the fuck of it, buy a couple more world-class talents they don't even need. And yet the egomaniacal plutocrats who run the club remain black holes of want; they insist upon unblemished excellence despite the fact that sports just don't work that way.

Sometimes you have excellent players, and you lose. Sometimes your coach is doing a great job, and you lose. Pérez knows why he sacked a capable manager who had the trust and affection of the locker room. He ran Ancelotti out because of a few minor hiccups, and because hiccuping isn't permissible at Madrid, even if it's inevitable. Pérez owns everything a man could want, but spends his nights on a veranda the size of a Manhattan apartment, scolding the moon for not obeying his commands. He's a silly man, but he's the boss. The most irritating thing about rich kidults is what a wretched spectacle they make of playing with their toys.