Perez learns the lessons of team's failures

Polling over 90 percent of the votes in Sunday's election for the Real Madrid presidency, Florentino Perez claimed the sort of crushing victory his "galactico" superteam failed to record last season.

The 57-year-old construction magnate inflicted a humiliating defeat on his two rivals, former president Lorenzo Sanz and fellow businessman Arturo Baldasano, who between them managed to collect a derisory six percent of the votes.

The election was an embarrassingly one-sided contest, but Perez took nothing for granted and expended considerable time, resources and energy to ensure his opponents were dealt a humbling defeat from which they will never recover.

In reality the 30,000 or so club members who chose to participate in the poll had little choice but to support Perez.

A vote for Sanz was seen as a vote for a return to the past, a return to the bad old days when the club was teetering on the brink of financial disaster, while it was hardly surprising they failed to support the novice Baldasano who clearly had few of the heavyweight connections enjoyed by Perez.

The voters also realised that, although he was reluctant to admit it, Perez had in fact subtly changed his policies and learned some of the lessons from the team's embarrassing failures on the pitch.

With his decision to sack Carlos Queiroz a day after the end of the club's first trophyless season in five years, Perez showed the sort of ruthless streak that has made him such a successful businessman.

The mild-mannered Portuguese coach appeared to be the scapegoat for the failures of an unbalanced team the Real president himself had helped construct.

Perez wasted no time in winning over discontented fans by appointing Jose Antonio Camacho as the new coach.

The former Real Madrid defender is the antithesis of the sort of players Perez has recruited since he began his presidency four years ago - blunt, unsophisticated and media unfriendly.

But more importantly he epitomised the virtues that Real fans felt the "galactico" superteam was lacking - unswerving devotion to the club, grit and determination.

At the same time, Perez also backtracked on his previously stated policy of only signing big-name attack minded players like Ronaldo and Zinedine Zidane by recruiting the first defender since he took office - Argentine international Walter Samuel.

The move was a clear indication to the fans that next season's team would be constructed according to footballing needs and the demands of the coach and not soley for the benefit of the marketing department.

Queiroz was never granted the luxury of such support, but the fall-out from the season made Perez realise that the value of his star players would collapse if the team failed to deliver the goods on the pitch.

This does not mean that he has dropped his policy of bringing a "galactico" to the team each year and his re-election almost certainly means a summer of speculation about whether Wayne Rooney, Ruud van Nistelrooy or Francesco Totti will move to the Bernabeu.

But the priority signings are likely to be Porto's distinctly unglamorous central defender Ricardo Carvalho and a holding midfielder such as his team mate Costinha, precisely the sort of middle-ranking players Perez said he would never sign.

One beneficiary of the new realpolitik approach to matters on the pitch is likely to be David Beckham.

The England captain may find himself freed from many of the defensive duties that conditioned his performances last season and will get a chance to prove himself in a freer, more attacking role.

If Perez has had to learn some lessons about realities on the pitch, he has never had any difficulty winning the confidence of the fans off it.

The overriding reason for his landslide victory was his success in boosting the club's image, modernising its administration and apparently solving its economic problems.

There is still plenty of confusion about the true state of Real's accounts, but Perez made it clear in his first four years at the helm that he has the political and financial clout to ensure there is no repetition of the crisis of four years ago.

A modernised stadium with a $36 million retractable roof, the completion of the new state-of-the-art training ground and the expansion of marketing opportunities in the Far East and America are his priorities in his second four-year term.