It’s impossible to speak about Real Madrid without complimentary and high-sounding words. Hardly anyone would question it being the most famous football club in the entire world. You can find a follower of that team anywhere in the world. ‘Los Merengues’ (the Creamy) have the biggest number of trophies in Spain and in the world.
The official date of establishment of the club is considered to be March 6, 1902. At that time the Palacios brothers founded a football club named ‘Real’. 18 years later the King of Spain Alfonso XIII awarded the team to its present name. Shortly after the team was created it became a powerful side: ‘Real’ won the Copa del Rey trophy just 3 years after formation.
In 1928 the club became one of those to stand up for holding a national football championship of Spain. Three years after the establishment of the championship ‘Real’ won the title and has repeated this success 31 times by now.
The landmark of the 1950s was the European Cup. Real decided not to put things aside winning the first ever competition in the season 1955/56 beating the German club Eintracht. At those times it was every player’s aspiration to get to Madrid squad and. Little changed since then. The club’s name was already associated with success and glory. The greatest players of those times were Alfredo Di Stéfano, Ferenc Puskás, Raymond Kopa.
The management of the European Football Association (UEFA) made a copy of the European Championship Clubs’ Cup specially for Real Madrid as they won it 5 times in a row. This copy is thoroughly kept in the club’s museum.
The ‘golden years’ of the club fell on the 1990s. Those were the times of Fabio Capello (the head coach of the team), Roberto Carlos, Predrag Mijatović, Clarence Seedorf and Davor Šuker. After a so-called ‘trophy drought’ lasting for almost 30 years the squad headed by Jupp Heynckes won back the title of Europe’s best team in the season 1997/98. The club from Madrid beat Juventus (Turin) in the final match with Mijatovic scoring one goal.
However the team was not able to compete on the same level at home and Capello was substituted by Vicente del Bosque and the president of the club Florentino Pérez set up to spend enormous sums of money to buy talented players. That was the epoch when Real Madrid used to sign the biggest stars of the time like David Beckham, Luís Figo, Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane. As long as no team could dream of the players in Real Madrid’s posession the team got nicknamed ‘Galácticos’.
Then Ramón Calderón was elected for Real Madrid president post after Florentino Pérez. He got rid of Beckham, Ronaldo and Roberto Carlos not accepting Pérez’s policy of signing the most expensive players. Calderón’s presidency could be notable only for forging the votes in the presidential elections and subsequent re-election of Florentino Pérez. Right after that the club started to sign famous players such as Kaká, Cristiano Ronaldo, Arjen Robben, Karim Benzema. Nevertheless those pricey transfers weren’t as efficient as it was expected.
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