Real Madrid president Pérez was blackmailed over the recordings. But he refused a ransom worth millions

At the start of this week, recordings surfaced of the Real Madrid president slandering his club’s stars. He could have prevented it all, but he rejected the blackmail.

In 2006, when Florentino Pérez was not president of Real Madrid, he let his mouth drop in front of the wrong man. Jose Antonio Abellán recorded the whole conversation, where Pérez calls Casillas “a little boy”, Raul “a manipulator” or Ronaldo “an imbecile”.

The journalist Abellán thought he’d struck a gold mine, but he didn’t do too well. For several years he tried to sell the tapes to Spanish newspapers, but no one was interested. So he resorted to a last resort.

According to Real Madrid’s official website, citing the reliable El Transistor, in 2011 Abellán had a meeting with the vice-president of the White Ballet, Eduardo Fernández de Blas, in which he was supposed to blackmail him for 10 million euros in exchange for the deletion of all the recordings.

However, neither Florentino Pérez nor his deputy agreed to this blackmail and Abellán continued to try. His luck ran out in July 2021, when his recordings were released to the world by the newspaper El Confidencial.

But his moment of fame could cost him dearly. Florentino Pérez has said that the recordings were made illegally and has already enlisted an army of his lawyers, some of the best in Spain.

Abellán and Confidencial may well be in for a nasty row with the police.

Source: Real Madrid