Without Judas there is no Christianity. Without Figo there would have been no Florentino. We do not know the hardships of Iscariot and why he needed those thirty coins, and only that supreme scriptwriter of Life, made them also thirty, but of millions of euros, which trapped Luis Figo in a pre-contract signed by Jose Veiga, his representative with the then candidate for the presidency of Real Madrid, Florentino Pérez. In the documentary The Figo Case: The Signing of the Century, directed and produced by David Tryhorn and Ben Nicholas and released on Netflix, no secrets of the most controversial transfer of the 90s are revealed to us, but it does put all the shellers before our eyes. In short, two devious poker players –Veiga and Figo– accustomed to fleecing fans –the presidents of Parma, Juventus and the directors of Barça– decide to rip off the man in gray of all life –Florentino–. What they didn’t know is that this turned out to be a cross between Al Capone, Hannibal Lecter and the guy who updated your grandmother’s La Caixa card.
If one is interested in what that was, the documentary is a wonderful piece of work that doesn’t go anywhere and that exposes the protagonists in front of the cameras, examples of a bygone era, in a brilliant staging. From that 21 years ago: there are no emails or WhatsApp messages but calls at midnight and unverified conversations but even with everything you can draw conclusions about what happened, the appearance of the actors and the collision of two eras: samurai with knives of dessert against soldiers with machine guns.
About the first. figure
None of this would have been possible without the irruption of one of the few who do not lie – the journalists, Valdano, Hierro, Guardiola and him –: Paolo Futre. He smelled commission, reviewed his prejudices and, finding them away from home, saw his great opportunity: 1.5 million euros. Futre forced Figo to sign for Madrid, but he could have enrolled him in the nursing service of a Chinese prison. Futre is huge and says what, at the end of the road, who loves you and has loved you is good for the lyric, but what he tells is the dough. From there, the key is the divided balls, in which Figo loses in almost all of them. Did the footballer know about the pre-contract or only the representative? Did Figo call Gaspart or not so that Barça would pay the 30-kilo clause…? Figo is not believable but rather has been cast into a story endorsed by the explosion of hate –the Catalan media were also covered in glory– but from the documentary it is clear that he did not want to leave Barça, that he was trapped –Veiga and him– in his own web of traps.
A new order arrived and the idea that sentimentality, moral superiority and being the club chosen by the God of the New Testament was enough, was broken. Here, we did not learn anything and two decades later we believed that independence could be achieved if, in a demonstration, you did not throw papers on the ground. Florentino imposed his way of doing things with a behavior that was as winning as it was ethically reprehensible – Madridismo also had another soul, which it lost in the fight until today – and, similarly, Laporta won an election against the favorite Bassat – do you remember the option over Beckham when he was already signed by Real?–, putting us in front of the idea that perhaps not everything goes to win
