Real Madrid were offered chance to pursue lucrative global tour over Champions League | OneFootball

Commercial entities floated a plan to Real Madrid that the Spanish club could pull out of the Champions League for a season and stage a world tour.

While the Bernabeu hierarchy were never going to agree to the idea due to how much they value winning actual trophies, the fact that external agents could even consider raising such a plan - including quoted figures of potentially €120m in revenue - is seen as reflecting the fraught position the game is in and a potential move to “globalised football”.

Uefa sources say Madrid did not even bother filling in the club feedback survey for the first season of the expanded Champions League in 2024-25, as they continue a legal war with Uefa from the ill-fated launch of the Super League in April 2021.

Madrid are also understood to have greatly resisted plans for Barcelona-Atletico Madrid to form the first Liga game in the United States, should the Spanish domestic competition eventually make the long-anticipated leap to playing games abroad.

The details come in the paperback update to this writer’s book, ‘States of Play: how sportswashing took over football’, released on Thursday 7 August. A new chapter delves into football in ‘the age of authoritarianism’, taking in Fifa president Gianni Infantino’s relationship with Donald Trump, as well as how billionaires’ impact on the sport is now starting to echo the real world.

Those in football even have a phrase for the latter, which is “billionaire idiot syndrome”. That is the dynamic of figures who became extremely wealthy in one field believing that affords them expertise in all areas, including football. Some managers have even complained of owners sending them proposed team line-ups, offering a modern spin on an old-fashioned problem.

The chapter outlines a growing fear in the sport that all of these forces are going to create a fully “globalised game”, where domestic leagues gradually decline in prominence against new competitions like the expanded Club World Cup.

Only emphasising Infantino’s burgeoning individual relationship with the Trump administration, the Fifa Council - notionally the most powerful body in the organisation - had no advance knowledge that Ivanka Trump would be opening the draw for the Club World Cup in December 2024.

It is also reported that Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s initial idea for his first few months of minority ownership of Manchester United was to culminate with Gareth Southgate’s appointment, but the former England manager did not want to discuss another role before Euro 2024.

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Florentino Perez has led Real Madrid throughout an awkward relationship with Uefa after the collapse of the Super League (Getty Images)

Ratcliffe wanted to make drastic changes in the first four months of his time at Old Trafford, as much to symbolise how things at the club were finally changing. This was intended to culminate with the appointment of Southgate but no deal could be struck before Euro 2024, so United were panicked into keeping Erik ten Hag that summer.

A chaotic first year eventually saw the Dutch coach replaced by Ruben Amorim and Dan Ashworth leaving as sporting director mere months into the job, a process that major rivals felt was “ludicrous”.