By Miguel Murado

“I DON’T want a team of millionaires” said a few days ago the new President of Real Madrid, full of self-righteous anger. I thought of him immediately. But no, he wasn’t referring to himself. He meant the players. It’s true, they’re millionaires too. “I want a team of workers,” he added. But he wasn’t thinking of putting workers in the place of the millionaires. What he intends is to make the millionaires work as hard as if they weren’t millionaires. Like all other millionaires, maybe.

He reminded me of that John Lennon song, Imagine. Peace-lovers all over the world become emotional when they hear it, and I can understand why. Yet I can’t help a smile when it comes to that part which goes “Imagine no possessions”. As Elvis Costello famously said, it takes a millionaire to say such a thing. Elvis Costello is a millionaire too, but he is right: Only when you have so much money you can indulge in the thought that if you just didn’t have so much your life could be even happier.

But poverty eluded Lennon, in the say way that wealth eludes many others, or even welfare. The more the singer tried to be authentic, the more he was admired by his fans and, as a consequence, the more money he made. Thus, in his pursue of spiritual balance and a simpler way of life, he ended up in a mansion in Berkshire with a Rolls Royce Phantom V and a chauffeur at his door. Escaping from wealth becomes sometimes as difficult as escaping from destitution.

The same applies to Real Madrid. I say Real Madrid, but it could be many other clubs. There was a time in which Real Madrid was a great club because it won titles. But lately it’s a great club precisely because it is a great club. It’s great because is big, because it’s a millionaire club: because it sells t-shirts with the effigy or the name of millionaires, because it signs millionaire contracts and takes millionaire commissions from those contracts. What Real sells is the same thing fashion magazines sell: The vicarious dream of luxury. Of course its hard-core followers would prefer to see their team play well and win. But it is no longer them who make Real Madrid great, but so many others, those who want to share that celebration of fame and money. They are those who “want to be like Bekham”; that is: They dream of being a millionaire footballer, but not because of the football side to it, but rather the millionaire side. Maybe a team of the poor would achieve more titles, but it may end up impoverishing its owners too. And, I guess, that’s not the idea.

(Miguel Murado is a former Middle East correspondent and current political analyst for the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia)

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia, 09 March 2006