There have been so many contributors to Real Madrid’s success over the past few
years and most of them have been afforded more than ample coverage.
But there’s one architect of the club’s recent triumphs who barely gets a mention:
José Ángel Sánchez, the current general director and Florentino Pérez’s right-hand man.
Sánchez has been at the club since the year 2000, since before current first-team squad
member Rodrygo was even born. That was the year when Florentino Pérez was first elected
to the Real Madrid presidency and the new boss hired marketing genius Sánchez,
a rising star from Segovia who had made a name for himself during the Nineties by running marketing
campaigns at Sega. He’d even become the company’s general director for the south of Europe.
He was just 33 at the time when he joined Real Madrid as the club’s new marketing director,
but Pérez had already identified Sánchez as a businessman who could get things done and
someone who had a bright future. At university, Sánchez had studied philosophy and had a way
with words that helped bring Sonic the Hedgehog to households across Spain.
That way with words also meant he was able to convince influential Spanish
journalist José María García to tone down his criticism of Pérez, a victory that the
new president wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Even after switching Sega for Real Madrid,
Sánchez’s primary focus remained on collecting golden rings. He believed that Real Madrid had the
strongest brand in world football and that this could and should be translated into far greater
revenues. Over the following years, he played a key role as the club saw its income skyrocket.
In Sánchez’s first full year at the club of 2001, Real Madrid’s operating income was €138m. By 2005,
that had doubled to €276m and was still growing. In 2006, though, Pérez resigned from the Real
Madrid presidency as a result of the poor sporting results. That summer, Ramón Calderón was elected
as the new president and most expected that Sánchez would depart. But that didn’t happen.
Calderón was won over by Sánchez and kept him on. When Pérez returned to the Real Madrid presidency
in 2009, Sánchez once again survived the change in administration. More than survive it,
he thrived - and was even promoted into a more influential role. Then, when Jorge Valdano left
as general director in 2011, Sánchez replaced him, becoming the second in command at the Bernabéu,
a role he has held ever since. By then, Sánchez wasn’t only focussed
on the commercial side of the business. He’d also become a key figure in sporting decisions
and was seen as “the closer” in some of the major transfers that Real Madrid completed
during Pérez’s second reign, including the world record signing of Cristiano Ronaldo.
Aided by his good relationship with Real Madrid coach Jose Mourinho,
Sánchez grew even more influential in Real Madrid decisions and in the world of football transfers
in general, always preferring to operate in the background and rarely granting interviews.
As is the case with anyone who works at the same place for two decades,
not everything has been successful during Sánchez’s time with the Spanish club. He
was heavily criticised in 2015 for the David de Gea fax machine debacle on deadline day and
for Real Madrid’s Copa del Rey disqualification after they fielded an illegal line-up by playing
the suspended Denis Cheryshev against Cádiz. Sánchez was also a key figure in bringing Rafa
Benítez to the club in that summer of 2015, in a move which certainly
wasn’t successful. Benitez left the club mid-season, after just 25 games in charge.
Prior to that, Pérez had been the main man when it came to hiring coaches, but the president was
so exhausted after the effort it took to prise Carlo Ancelotti away from PSG in 2013 that he
entrusted Sánchez with replacing the Italian two years later. The Benítez experiment didn’t work
out and Pérez turned to B team coach Zinedine Zidane. The rest, as they say, is history.
However, Zidane’s decision to quit in the summer of 2018 also went down
as a black mark against Sánchez, with Pérez supposedly unhappy that his general director
hadn’t been able to anticipate it. Real Madrid were caught off-guard and would lurch towards
Julen Lopetegui and the associated farce. Overall, though, Sánchez has achieved far
more good for Real Madrid than bad. His decision to hire Juni Calafat in 2014 has paid dividends
for Real Madrid as Calafat has been key in Real Madrid’s transfer policy switch to signing the
world’s best young talents. Vinicius Junior, Rodrygo, Martin Odegaard, Fede Valverde,
Andriy Lunin and Eder Militao are just some of the players he has helped acquire.
Two decades on from his arrival, then, Sánchez is trusted more than ever and his salary was
recently increased to a reported 3 million euros. Florentino Pérez will celebrate his
74th birthday in 2021 and the president cannot oversee everything at the club like he did in
years gone by. More and more, Pérez works out of his office at his construction company ACS,
while it’s Sánchez who works out of the Bernabéu and the training centre at Valdebebas.
Sánchez has been linked with a Real Madrid exit in the past,
with rumours suggesting he could take a role at Manchester United or even with Jorge Mendes’
GestiFute agency. But Sánchez has remained in Madrid and continues to quietly build his legacy.
In 2017, Bayern Munich’s then-technical director Michael Reschke stated that Real Madrid should
even build a monument to Sánchez, praising how he’d overseen the club’s signing of Marco Asensio
for just 3.5 million euros. That will never happen, nor most likely would he want it to,
but the thought remains emblematic of his contribution to the club’s modern success.