MADRID — The television appearance was designed as a campaign moment. Enrique Riquelme, the renewable-energy entrepreneur challenging Florentino Pérez for the Real Madrid presidency, walked onto the set of Antena 3’s El Hormiguero on Wednesday night holding a white shirt with the name Haaland and the number nine. His message was simple: elect me, and Erling Haaland plays at the Bernabéu.
Manchester City’s response, delivered within hours, was anything but simple. “The stories which have emerged from Spain regarding the future of Erling Haaland are untrue,” the club said in a statement. “There is no chance of this happening and there is no contractual clause to enable it. We are considering legal action for the use of our player image in this context.”
Haaland’s own camp piled on. His father, Alf-Inge Haaland, and his agent, Rafaela Pimenta — who manages the book of contracts inherited from the late Mino Raiola — issued a joint denial to transfer journalist Fabrizio Romano. “All very entertaining but NOT true,” they said, capturing in four words the gap between Riquelme’s electioneering and contractual reality. Haaland is under contract at the Etihad until 2034.
The episode is the most dramatic yet in what has become the first genuinely contested Real Madrid presidential election since 2006. Pérez, who turns 80 this year and has led the club for 23 of the past 26 years, called for fresh elections after Madrid completed two consecutive trophy-less seasons. Riquelme, 37, announced his candidacy on May 21. The ballot among the club’s socios — members who pay annual dues in exchange for the right to vote — takes place this Sunday, June 7.
Riquelme’s strategy borrows deliberately from the playbook that launched Pérez’s original rise. In 2000, Pérez won the presidency by making a single, extraordinary promise: he would sign Luís Figo from Barcelona. He delivered within days of taking office, and the rest became Galáctico mythology. Riquelme appears to believe the same logic applies in 2026 — that naming a marquee player loudly enough, and backing the claim with a personalised jersey on prime-time television, is sufficient to move votes.
On Haaland, he told viewers: “He has a release clause and would like to join Real Madrid.” He went further still. “If I break my promises regarding either of these players, I’ve signed a guarantee where I’d pay 100 per cent of membership costs for next season” — a personal financial pledge to all 100,000 paying members that would run to tens of millions of euros if his candidates never arrive.
The second player in that promise is Rodri. The Ballon d’Or winner and Haaland’s teammate at City has a year remaining on his contract and has done little to quiet speculation about his future. “I have one year left on my contract, there will be a point where we will have to sit down and talk,” Rodri told Onda Cero recently. When pressed specifically on interest from Real Madrid, he added the clause that has been quoted in every newsroom since: “You can’t turn down the best clubs in the world.” City have so far maintained they will not sell him this summer. Riquelme told ESPN he has “spoken to his agent” and described Rodri as “the kind of player who should play for Real Madrid.”
Whether either signing was ever genuinely possible is, at this point, almost beside the point. City’s legal warning makes clear that the club regards Riquelme’s use of Haaland’s image as a step across a line. The specific complaint, according to multiple reports, stems in part from the television show’s host, Pablo Matos, displaying the Haaland shirt — meaning the image of City’s contracted player was deployed as a campaign prop on broadcast television without the club’s consent.
Pérez’s campaign, meanwhile, chose the same Wednesday evening to land its own headline. A brief video posted to the official Florentino 2026 social media account showed a smiling José Mourinho, dressed in a Real Madrid shirt, saying simply: “Yes.” Mourinho, who previously managed Madrid between 2010 and 2013, has been in discussions with the club for weeks. He currently holds a contract at Benfica with one year remaining; the Portuguese club has already begun planning for his departure.
Riquelme has made his opposition to Mourinho explicit. He told Spanish newspaper ABC he “was never a fan” of the coach and favoured a longer-term project — citing the botched handling of Xabi Alonso as the template he would not repeat. “Bringing Xabi Alonso back was the right decision, and it was a mistake to let him go,” he said, referring to Alonso’s tenure that ended with the manager choosing Chelsea over a new cycle at the Bernabéu. “You can’t create a project in three months.”
Sources told ESPN that Mourinho values working “where he feels wanted” and would not be comfortable under a board that had publicly stated he was not its first choice. The formal announcement of Madrid’s new coaching appointment is expected only after the June 7 vote.
Riquelme also announced that club legends Raúl González and Fernando Hierro would join his leadership team if he won — the kind of sentimental casting that plays well in a membership vote but says little about transfer capacity or sporting infrastructure. Whether the members respond more to nostalgia or to Pérez’s record of delivery is the actual question at the ballot box. Pérez has not been seriously challenged at an election in two decades, and the last time he faced a contested race, in 2000, he won it by promising exactly the kind of headline signing Riquelme is attempting to mimic now.
What Riquelme appears not to have calculated for is the possibility that the target of his promise would push back — and that Manchester City, one of the wealthiest and most legally assertive clubs on the planet, would treat the stunt as an actionable misuse of their player’s image. Whether City pursue the matter in court or allow the threat to stand as a deterrent may depend on how Sunday’s vote goes. A Pérez re-election would likely see the Haaland chapter closed quietly; a Riquelme presidency would open a different set of questions entirely, none of which his television shirt answered.
