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Football

20th Apr 2021

Florentino Perez says football matches may ‘have to be shorter’ to appeal to younger fans

Danny Jones

Another bad take from the man who thinks the Super League will ‘save football’

Real Madrid President, Florentino Perez, is one of those at the heart of the Super League breakaway – the delightfully dubbed, ‘Dirty Dozen’ – and following yesterday’s mass outrage across the footballing world, he took to Spanish TV to try and defend the major move.

Speaking on El Chiringuito de Jugones, Perez was quoted as saying: “We are doing this to save football at this critical moment”. However, things got even more bizarre and out of touch when he suggested that “young people find football matches too long” and “not interesting”, before posing the possibility that “we might have to make the football matches shorter”. Yikes.

If, for some reason, you still needed to be convinced that the people behind the Super League switch don’t know what the fans what, or rather, simply don’t care: this should be all you need. No follower of football has ever suggested 90 minutes is too long – not one.

Perez also went on to take UEFA and FIFA to task for “managing the monopolies”, whilst trying to insist there is “less and less audience, less and less money”.

Translating the interview via his tweets, Fabrizio Romano noted Perez’s declaration: “We will NOT back down. If they want to wait for 2024 to make the reform, they can wait. We’re not waiting for anyone because we need the #SuperLeague.

As if only to make matters worse, Perez also struggled to name all of the ‘Big Six’ Premier League teams set to be involved in the breakaway; it took the producers of the show to give him a nudge before he remembered Chelsea and Spurs.

El Chiringuito is a football debate show in Spain, often criticised for focusing too heavily on just Barcelona and Real Madrid – lattermost even more so, having previously been called “excessively Madridista”. With that in mind, it’s little surprise that Perez used his time for nothing more than pro-Madrid and pro-Super League propaganda.