Florentino Perez, the grand old man of Real Madrid, did not leave much unsaid as he laid out his world view at the club’s AGM, which – as can be the case with men of a certain vintage – turned into a list of the people and the things he does not like.

Uefa, Javier Tebas, La Liga’s private equity deal with CVC, referees, Var, the new Champions League format, Tebas again. All of them subject to the ire of the 76-year-old who has ruled over European football’s most successful club for 20 of the past 23 years but in recent times has been unable to resist the great changes to the financial landscape. The European Super League was Perez’s last card and he played it badly. Yet he still holds it, dog-eared and worn, hoping that it will one day prove part of a winning hand.

So opposed to Uefa is Perez that he compared the “unprecedented institutional crisis” of European football as he sees it to the commercial obsolescence of Kodak. “The Super League,” he said on Saturday, “is needed more now than ever”.

He believes on Dec 21 the European Court of Justice will rule in favour of Uefa having to open up its competitions and license the Super League, although not everyone shares that view. This month the club once again claimed to be in profit, but its balance sheet is propped up by huge sales of future revenue – the infamous financial levers, or “palancas” as they are known in Spain.

Another Perez attack on the status quo from the club that once was the establishment. What is going on here? Perez knows some difficult decisions are coming. Not least what happens next summer, when at last it appears at least that the great prize sought by Real for so long – Kylian Mbappe, arguably the world’s best footballer – is due to be out of contract. This is the moment Real have been waiting for and yet nothing looks simple.

There was a plain weird official club statement last Saturday in which Real denied having begun backdoor negotiations with the Mbappe camp. Given that it came apropos of the kind of flaky reports that appear regularly in the Spanish media, it could easily have been ignored.

Then this week, the Cadena Ser radio station, not known for rocking the boat, solemnly reported that Mbappe might not be coming to Real after all. His salary demands, the report, concluded, would be just too great. Meanwhile, in an interview, the Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser Al-Khelaifi, himself recovering from surgery, was upbeat about Mbappe and his PSG “legacy”.

Mbappe may yet leave, perhaps even for Real. He may renew with PSG. A decision is likely in the spring. The consensus seems to be that Mbappe will go where he believes he has the best chance of winning the Champions League. He would like to be part of the first team to do so at PSG but if that seems unlikely, he will leave and it may not necessarily be for Real.

With free agency wage demands likely to be around €70 million per year there are not many who could afford Mbappe, even in the Premier League. As for Real, that question is even more pertinent.

The club are not the biggest payers in European football as they were when, at the turn of the century, in Perez’s first period as president, they broke the transfer market. Jude Bellingham’s first contract did not make him the club’s best-paid player, although his second surely will. Mbappe’s wage demands would place extraordinary pressure on Real, and force upwards what Bellingham would be entitled to demand. All in a period when their finances are already at breaking point.

The AGM voted to authorise another €370 million loan, and as the debt soars, Perez is now, it seems, suggesting an enormous shift in the club’s 121-year-old member-owned constitution. Few details but he mentioned a corporate restructure which would likely see Real privatise itself by stealth, selling off parts of its it operation as subsidiaries in the same way that Barcelona has done.

It was indicative that one of the first questions from the floor at the AGM, from a YouTuber, was about the €70 million (£61 million) of player sales budgeted into the club’s financial projections for next year. That caveat, leaked ahead of Saturday’s meeting, has been a source of concern for the legion of online Real fans who have done their best to ignore the financial realities of the club.

That was one of a number of signs that point towards the strain on the finances. In the summer of last year, Real sold 30 per cent of revenue over 20 years from their remodelled Bernabeu stadium €360 million (£306 million) to the US investor Sixth Street. Previous agreements which began in the financial year 2017-2018 for the sale of future revenue had been in place with another US investor, Providence. The club books these profits as revenue but Uefa sees them as debt.

The Telegraph revealed in July that €122 million (£103 million), 20 per cent of Real’s costs, are unaccounted for in last year’s financial results. The club has always refused to clarify what this expense, a sub-category of “other operating expenses” is used to cover, or specifically whether it is the repayment on the sale of future revenue streams.

The debt for the stadium remodelling project is an extra cost and has climbed to a separate €1.2 billion, only €800 million of which is covered in the original financing bond. In May, Real lost an arbitration tribunal in Paris with the Abu Dhabi energy giant Mubadala over a €400 million stadium naming agreement from 2014 that the club sought to enforce. The sum is almost equal to the new €370 million borrowings the members are being asked to approve.

For many the size of the debt is too great to contemplate. The numbers mean little, but the effect they might have on a club’s transfer summer, especially when it comes to Mbappe – that is one thing they all notice.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaJ6fpMGjrculZmtoYmh8cn2OamloqpWWuW65wJ2popxdm7avrc2cnKxllqG8s7HNraCnp12lsrOx2WaisqSZlrtuucGap6mdXw%3D%3D