Lopetegui was just a symptom of the biggest problem at Real Madrid

There’s an old concept that tries to explain the most dramatic events in the course of history. It’s called the great man theory, and it posits that history swivels when great men act decisively. It’s an old and circular idea – isn’t it history that makes the man great, rather than the other way around? – that’s largely been debunked. But some kernel of it remains in our Western thinking.

Today, there’s a broad belief that the great men of our time are tycoons and oligarchs and moguls. Men – almost always, but that’s a different issue – who have been wildly successful in one type of business are pushed onto a pedestal. No matter if their riches are the byproduct of some fluke or genuinely earned.

The assumption is made that such men are special. That they are visionaries whose insight and abilities will translate to just about anything else. It’s how we wind up electing businessmen with no prior experience to public offices – or giving them powerful jobs in administrations. This kind of hagiography tends to be accepted by the recipients of it, who come to believe that their minds are somehow special.

So let’s talk about Real Madrid’s 71-year-old president Florentino Perez, now in his second spell at the head of the club in which he has consolidated power and made himself immovable. Perez is a civil engineer who built a construction company into a Spanish juggernaut that made him a billionaire.

There’s no diagnosing Perez from afar, but he has ruled Real with an iron fist, unquestioning in his own judgment of a sport he never had any apparent credentials in. He has lured and dumped superstar signings — galacticos, in the parlance – meddled with lineups or outright written them up himself, pushed out locker room stalwarts who grew too powerful, and hired and fired coaches willy-nilly. In everything that happens at the most successful soccer club in the world, there is the hand of Perez, a builder.

And if you were to read the record books charitably, results have vindicated him. During Perez’s rule from 2000 to 2006 and 2009 to the present, Real has won the Champions League five times – including the last three in a row – and La Liga four times. Yet he has also bungled his way into various crises, as well as the club’s current issues.

Real is, at present, without a manager.

On Monday, Julen Lopetegui was fired just five months into the job following a 5-1 thrashing at the hands of arch-rivals FC Barcelona on Sunday.

And so now, as these things go, the behind-the-scenes political dealings at the club are coming to light. The New York Times reports that Lopetegui only got the job because a small handful of other managers that Perez preferred had turned him down, following Zinedine Zidane’s surprise resignation after a third European crow in two and a half seasons in charge. And that Lopetegui had to be cajoled, or maybe bullied, into taking the job by his ever-eager super-agent Jorge Mendes, a close Perez ally.

They all got the timing badly wrong. Lopetegui, who made one senior team appearance for Real and five for Barca as a goalkeeper, had spent most of his managerial career as a Spanish youth national team coach. Then, a disappointing spell with FC Porto paved the way for his surprise appointment as Spain manager. He went undefeated in 20 games and caught Perez’s eye.

But against the manager’s wishes, Perez insisted on announcing Lopetegui’s hiring days before Spain would open its World Cup campaign – reportedly fearing that disappointment in Russia would tarnish his new coach. Brand new Royal Spanish Football Federation president Luis Rubiales felt betrayed and fired his manager on the eve of the tournament, dooming the World Cup co-favorites to a Round-of-16 exit to a poor Russia squad.

More bad timing: Lopetegui took the job when it was clear that Real’s team was aging and had possibly grown stale; that there was a good chance that goal-machine Cristiano Ronaldo might leave; and that Perez, as in the last few years, seemed uninclined to inject new galacticos into the mix. The team had enough stars already, the reasoning went.

Per ESPN, Perez quickly second-guessed himself about Lopetegui when he wasn’t able to rouse Real from its slumber and stir the sated stars into better performances.

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That’s why Perez soon decided he’d better replace the Xs-and-Os coach with a disciplinarian, like the unemployed Antonio Conte, lately of Chelsea. Except that the influential locker room leaders didn’t like the sound of that and are apparently holding up the Conte appointment. So Santiago Solari, a five-year veteran of Real’s first team but a coaching neophyte, has been installed as caretaker following Lopetegui’s inevitable firing following five straight winless league games.

And that reveals another truth about Perez and his regime. Much of its success has the look of being bought or accidental.

In the early 2000s, Real’s unmatched financial firepower allowed it to sign Luis Figo, Zidane, the Brazilian Ronaldo and David Beckham in short order, paving the way for Perez’s first European championship and two Spanish league titles. But he did so with a manager, Vicente del Bosque, whom he’d inherited but wasn’t sold on.

Perez then burned through six more managers before he won La Liga again and a total of 11 before Carlo Ancelotti finally won him another Champions League. Sure enough, Perez pushed the Italian out the following season. After Rafa Benitez crashed and burned, Zidane, the second-team coach, was only appointed because any other credible option had turned the job down.

Which is to say that an awful lot of the good things that have happened to Real in a decade-and-a-half of Perez seem to have happened in spite of him, not because of him. And most of the bad, meanwhile, like the relative underperformance and the coaching carousel and the Game of Thrones-esque locker room dynamics, seem very much of his making.

So too is Real’s current predicament, in which it might once again be relegated to sticking with an unwanted manager. Perhaps that will work out surprisingly well again, but it’s doubtful given that Solari doesn’t have Zidane’s instant credibility with the senior players.

If Conte can’t be imposed on the team, Real has a manager problem. Perez seems to have just about run out of options. A manager of good repute can hardly be blamed for preferring employment at one of Europe’s other superclubs. He’d be saving himself the Florentino Perez headache. Because Real has a Perez problem.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a Yahoo Sports soccer columnist and a sports communication lecturer at Marist College. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.

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