The Figo case, recently released on Netflix, recreates with its main actors a capital moment in football, which in the summer of 2000 definitively abandoned its pre-industrial tradition, settling in a model governed by corporate sharks and packed with specimens with parasitic intentions .
The plot is simple: an excellent player (Luis Figo), captain of a prestigious team (FC Barcelona), speculates on his future and arranges a secret contract with one of the candidates (Florentino Pérez) for the presidency of the rival club by definition. (Real Madrid).
This candidate is not the favorite in the forecasts, but the operation comes in handy for the footballer, who is cuddly and wants more affection from Barça.
He wants some more zeros in his bank account.
The plot of Netflix adds very little to what is known so far.
The only newsworthy thing is the juicy commission that José Veiga, representative of the Portuguese player, and Paulo Futre, a festive character who appears on the scene to serve as a hook in the operation, took.
At one point in the documentary, he cannot contain himself and recounts how the commission agreed with Florentino Pérez: "I told him 10 million, he told me five and we settled on six."
In those same days, Florentino Pérez raised the electoral banner of his blunt opposition to the commission agents.
The outcome is known.
Florentino Pérez defeated Lorenzo Sanz in the elections, who was convinced of the revenue that Madrid's victory in the Paris 2000 final would bring him. Although the importance of the postal vote collection network was crucial in Florentino Pérez's victory , the most repeated thesis links its success to the Figo affair and to an agreement never denied and never confirmed, a masterful pirouette in the art of communication.
Figo meant to Florentino what the banner on the Paseo de La Habana meant to Laporta in the last Barça elections.
The documentary is solvent in its production and has a wide range of characters, most of them necessary for a peculiar story, an unexpected mix of Mariano Ozores and Martin Scorsese, of Los Bingueros and Casino, of beach rogues —Veiga, Futre and Figo— , victims of the tocomocho —Joan Gaspart— and two characters of historical magnitude who would soon define football in the 21st century, each one in his own plot.
One is Florentino Pérez, the man who took soccer out of its parochial space and placed it in the bouncy economic scenario that whetted the appetite of American bankers and businessmen, Russian oligarchs and oil sheikhs.
Pep Guardiola, a close friend of Figo, is the other substantial character, but wasted in the story.
Guardiola does not hide his admiration for him as a player, but he does not go further.
In a plot that places Figo in an arguable moral position, there is no reference to the deep disappointment that Guardiola was caused by the presence of his friend on the bench, along with Mourinho, in the famous Barça-Inter Milan semi-final that took place played at the Camp Nou.
Figo also chose that night.
Florentino Pérez wins by a landslide in the case.
He prevails because he has a plan and he executes it with military precision.
The rest waver between greedy opportunism and serious strategic deficits.
This is the case of Joan Gaspart, a character from a world that has already perished.
Veiga and Futre clean up the plate, but they are two puppets at Florentino's service.
Figo desperately seeks alibis to justify him, but he does not dare to say that greed won him out.
He didn't have a plan either.
He speculated and ended up where he didn't intend.
Only Guardiola had a plan in the lineup of actors, but Florentino Pérez would find out about it nine years later.
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