Enrique Riquelme has entered the Real Madrid presidential race with the kind of campaign platform that makes you wonder if he confused the club with a holiday resort chain. His big promise? Swimming pools. Padel courts. A basketball arena. The holy trinity of leisure amenities, presented as the cornerstone of a vision to lead one of the world’s most successful football institutions.
Let that sink in for a moment. Real Madrid — the club with 15 European Cups, the club that signed Kylian Mbappé this summer, the club that has won La Liga more times than most franchises have existed — is being asked to consider a presidential candidate whose main pitch is essentially: “Imagine if we had better facilities for you to relax in after you watch us play.”
This is not a serious football vision. This is what happens when someone mistakes a football club for a municipal leisure centre with a pitch attached.
There is something almost admirable about the sheer audacity of running on this platform. Riquelme is not promising revolutionary youth development. He is not outlining a coherent transfer strategy or a vision for tactical evolution. He is not even promising to win anything specific. No, he is promising that when you come to watch Real Madrid, you will be able to swim laps and hit a backhand volley. The implication being that if the football itself becomes unbearable, at least you can dry off and play some padel.
The genius of this approach is that it completely sidesteps the actual job of running a football club. Real Madrid’s president does not need to be a football visionary — though it helps. They need to be a strategist capable of navigating boardroom politics, a negotiator who can close billion-euro deals, someone with the political capital to manage an institution that has existed for 125 years and has expectations that would crush most mortals. But sure, let us talk about the swimming pools.
What makes this even more delicious is the timing. Real Madrid just spent the summer assembling what many consider the most talented squad on the planet. They have Mbappé, Vinícius Júnior, Jude Bellingham, and Rodrygo. They have a manager in Carlo Ancelotti who has forgotten more about winning than most people will ever know. The club is positioned to dominate European football for the next five years. And the presidential campaign is being fought over whether the fans should be able to do the butterfly stroke between matches.
Imagine being a Real Madrid supporter and hearing this pitch. You have spent the last season watching your club win trophies. You are about to watch them attempt to win more. And your choice for club president is between people with actual football experience and someone who believes the path to glory runs through the leisure complex.
The basketball arena is perhaps the most bewildering addition to this trinity. As if Real Madrid’s identity was somehow incomplete without a court for a sport that has roughly zero connection to the club’s history or culture. It is the kind of idea that emerges from a brainstorming session where someone said “what if we just added things” and nobody said no.
This is what modern football has become in pockets: a strange hybrid where the actual sport is secondary to the experience, the merchandise, the hospitality, the lifestyle branding. Riquelme is not inventing this trend — he is just making it hilariously explicit. He is running for president of a football club on a platform that treats football as an afterthought to the amenities.
What is most offensive about this campaign is not that it is stupid — though it is — but that it is cynical. It assumes that Real Madrid supporters care more about where they can exercise their leisure time than about the direction of their club. It assumes that the presidency is a real estate development job, not a leadership position. It assumes that the institution can be run like a resort, with the football matches as a kind of entertainment garnish on top of the main attraction: the pools and courts.
Real Madrid will almost certainly not elect Riquelme. The club has too much institutional sense for that. But the fact that he felt confident enough to run on this platform tells you something about the state of modern football politics. It tells you that someone believed that promising luxury amenities was a winning strategy for leading one of the world’s greatest clubs.
Meanwhile, somewhere in a Real Madrid training session, Mbappé is probably wondering if his new president will at least understand the offside rule. But do not worry, Kylian — there is a beautiful padel court where you can decompress after all those confusing tactical meetings.