An entrepreneur, lets call him Phil, comes up with a product. It can be any product: a website, a toaster, a killer ninja battle droid, you name it, but Phil designs and develops it. He makes it successful. It’s him who brings this product to the attention of the world… and it’s a truly great product. Now once this online killer ninja robot toaster is in the public eye, and shown to be a success, a big corporation buys it. It pays off Phil, the entrepreneur, creator and nurturer, and takes the product for itself, selling it under it’s name and reaping the benefits of it’s spin off fluffy toys and lunch boxes. The great product is now owned by the corporation, helping it succeed, which it does.
Who is great in this equation? Phil or the corporation?
I ask you this because this is how I often see Real Madrid. Most people probably casually accept Real Madrid as king of the uber-super clubs, but why? What actual pragmatic reason is there for this lofty assumption? Before you try and figure it out, Phil isn’t supposed to be anyone at all, but I could, feasibly, have given him any number of names, Alex, Carlo, Claude, Jose, Rafa, Gérard, Louis etc but I didn’t want to tie it to one instance. Because there isn’t one instance. Madrid don’t really develop players. They don’t really even develop teams. They let other clubs and other managers do this, and once the player has proved his worth to the world, they buy him, and use him to make themselves more successful. Which often, they do.
Historically of course, Real are undoubtably great. The early teams of the Di Stefano era and the Quinta del Buitre generation of the 80s are both truly great sides. But in the last 25 years what have Madrid achieved, on their own merit, to make them truly great? Because it’s only really in the last 25 years, even the last 10, that this claim has been forcibly made....
...and on and on over here...
Will the Real 'Biggest Club in the World' please stand up | FootballFanCast.com
..I hate them elmo. They're twats.
or so do I hope.