In 2006, election controversy engulfed Spanish football. It began on February 27th,
when Florentino Pérez announced his resignation as president of Real Madrid.
Perez had been in charge since 2000, when he won with 16,469 votes to the 13,302 votes
of Lorenzo Sanz. Terms at the club are four years long and Pérez was re-elected in 2004,
winning in a landslide. He took 21,377 votes and his nearest challenger was again Lorenzo Sanz,
this time all the way behind on 1,189 votes.
Pérez had won re-election because his Galacticos policy was working. But doubts had begun to creep
in about a philosophy which so often challenged conventional wisdom. A trophyless 2004/05 was
followed by a poor start the following year and, just after a 2-1 loss away at Real Mallorca,
Pérez announced he was stepping aside, with Real Madrid 10 points behind Barcelona in the table.
As he departed, Pérez told club members that change was needed and that “this is the right
moment for me to leave the presidency. It’s up to the Real Madrid members to decide the future path
for the institution. They’re the only owners.” It’s true. Real Madrid is one of just a few
Spanish clubs to have retained special rights as a members-run sporting club. The members are granted
a vote by law and Pérez’s resignation set in motion the march to fresh presidential elections.
It was an intense and chaotic campaign from the start, as five candidates vied for the presidency.
Sanz, a former president and the runner-up in the previous two elections, stood again,
this time against Ramón Calderón, Juan Miguel Villar Mir, Juan Palacios and Arturo Baldasano.
As election day approached, the controversy started. Two days before the election,
a judge from the regional lower courts declared that mail-in ballots would not
be valid in the election, at least provisionally. All votes would have to be made in person at the
tent set up outside the Bernabéu for voting between the hours of 9am and 8pm on July 2nd
and Real Madrid were instructed to place at least two large adverts in the weekend’s newspapers
to alert all members to this development. This court ruling followed complaints made
by candidates Calderón and Baldasano, with the reasoning that the validity of the postal votes
could not be guaranteed. Accusations of fraud were being made and being heard, including.
Under a sea of doubts, election day arrived and overall turnout was slightly down
on the previous 2004 election, when postal votes had been allowed to count.
On election day 2006, 42.2% of the Real Madrid members who had a right to a vote turned up
outside the stadium to cast their ballots and Ramón Calderón was the winner, but only just.
Calderón achieved 8,344 votes, just 246 more than the 8,098 of Juan Palacios. Yet a winner
wasn’t announced immediately. Club secretary José Eulogio Aranguren explained that Calderón had won
on the day, but suggested that the declaration of a winner lay in the hands of the Madrid Law
Society, given the potential for the courts’ ruling on postal votes to be overturned.
Real Madrid did, though, then announce Calderón as the winner on the afternoon of July 3rd.
Third-placed Juan Miguel Villar-Mir, the Florentino Pérez continuity candidate,
was believed to have had strong support among postal voters and remained defiant that the
election wasn’t over. “Don’t celebrate too soon, Mr Calderón, because the Electoral Committee
cannot declare anyone as winner when there are still 8,000 postal votes to be counted.”
"They are trying to deny me the presidency even though I have won the vote,” Calderón
told his supporters in response Eight months later, the postal vote
would eventually be nullified. Nevertheless, despite the legal wrangling and controversy
during that period, Calderón was able to get to work. It was summertime, after all,
and there was a lot of business to get done. First, Fabio Capello was brought back to the
club as coach, while Fabio Cannavaro, José Antonio Reyes, Mahamadou Diarra, Emerson and
Ruud van Nistelrooy were all signed that summer. Real Madrid went on to win back-to-back league
titles in 2006/07 and 2007/08 and Calderón also set the signing of Cristiano Ronaldo in motion,
but his presidency only lasted two and a half years, before he himself resigning on January 16th
2009 after a scandal at the club’s general assembly. There, some members without the
right to a vote had cast ballots and, despite proclaiming a clear conscience and “denying the
lies” written about him, Calderón eventually gave in to the mounting pressure and stepped aside,
with Vicente Boluda taking over as interim president until the summer of 2009.
Even though scandal ended Calderón’s presidency prematurely, the courts took his side when ruling
on the original postal votes controversy. Calderón was even accused in a Telecinco
documentary titled ‘Asalto a la Casa Blanca’ – or ‘Storming the White House’ in English – of
having forged postal votes himself to provoke the suspicions of foul play that led to the postal
votes being discounted. However, nothing was ever proven against him in the courts.
One court case that was proven involved a Real Madrid member named Domingo Alberto Villaverde,
who was found to have falsified at least 24 postal votes while he was working on
Juan Miguel Villar-Mir’s campaign and he was handed a suspended prison sentence of 15 months.
In the summer of 2009, Florentino Pérez stood uncontested in the new elections
and returned to the presidency, where he has remained ever since. There haven’t been contested
elections at Real Madrid since those of 2006, as Pérez also won uncontested in 2013 and 2017
and may once again stand without a rival in 2021. It’s likely to be some time before an election
as dramatic as 2006 is fought again. In football, at least.