REAL MADRID legends Iker Casillas and Raul are the ‘club’s greatest scams’, according to Los Blancos chief Florentino Perez who made the comments in leaked audio.
Perez – in the recording from 2006 – calls iconic goalkeeper Casillas a ‘great failure’ and ranks Raul as the biggest scam in the Bernabeu club’s history.
The audio was leaked by Spanish outlet El Confidencial and is from a recording of a conversation Perez had 15 years ago.
Perez – who says the conversation was recorded without his knowledge – is heard saying: “Casillas is not a goalkeeper for Real Madrid. What do you want me to tell you?
“He is not. He has never been. It has been the great failure we’ve had.
“What happens is that you have those who adore him, they want him, they talk to him, I don’t know. They defend him so much.
“Well it is one of the great scams and the second is Raul. The two great Madrid scams are Raul first and Casillas second.”
Perez, 74, has confirmed it was him in the recordings but says he is getting his lawyers involved ‘study possible actions to take’.
In a statement released on Real’s website, he said: “Given the news broadcast in El Confidencial, in which phrases attributed to me are published, I think it is necessary to clarify:
“The reproduced phrases are pronounced in conversations clandestinely recorded by Mr. José Antonio Abellán [a Spanish journalist], who has been trying to sell them for many years without success.
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“It is surprising now that, despite the time that has elapsed, the newspaper El Confidencial published them today.
“They are single phrases of conversations taken out of the broad context in which they occurred.
“They have been reproduced now, after so many years have passed since those conversations took place, [and] I understand that it is due to my participation as one of the promoters of the Super League.
“I have put the matter in the hands of my lawyers who are studying the possible actions to take.”
Raul, 44, played 741 games for the Spanish giants between 1994 and 2010 and is one of their most iconic Galacticos. He is the club’s record appearance maker.
He scored 324 goals and laid on 112 assists in that time – also bagging six LaLiga and three Champions League titles.
The 102-cap Spain international also won Spanish footballer of the year five times in that spell, as well as finishing as the top scorer in LaLiga twice and the Champions League once.
Raul is the current manager of Real Madrid Castilla, the club’s reserve team, and so is an employee of Perez.
Not bad for a scam really.
But Perez went on: “Raul is bad, he believes that Madrid is his and uses everything that is in Madrid for his own benefit.
“He is a negative figure, he is destroying Madrid and the morale of the players so that they say: ‘It is Madrid that is bad, not Raul.’ It is terrible how bad the boy is.”
It also turns out Casillas – the other subject of the quotes – was quite good for the club too.
The retired 40-year-old is second on Real’s all-time appearance list having featured for Los Blancos 725 times.
And in 264 of those matches, the 167-cap Spain international kept a clean sheet.
He is a World Cup winner and twice won the Euros with the iconic Spain team between 2008 and 2012.
And like Raul he also won LaLiga five times and the Champions League three during his first team run between 1999 and 2015.
Casillas also bagged two Copa del Rey titles before leaving for Porto to finish his career there.
Reaction was unsurprisingly scathing on Twitter with Kush’s contribution the pick of the bunch.
He tweeted: “Won’t be surprised if few years down the line we get another leaked quote of Perez saying, [Cristiano] Ronaldo as the third great Madrid scam.”
Perez is most well known in recent times for being one of the leading voices in the plans to form the European Super League.
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