Glamour back at Real

Only a few weeks have passed since Barcelona completed their historic treble but now the return of Florentino Perez to Real Madrid has already stolen the limelight from their bitter enemies with the audacious signings of Ronaldo and Kaka.

Perez is believed to have more big names on his shopping list.

In the build up to last month's elections at Real, Kaka was unveiled by the Perez campaign as the big money signing for 65 million euros from AC Milan, in what appears to be a return to the galacticos days when the club brought in a major star each season.

But it has been the signing of Ronaldo for 94 million euros which has really set pulses racing in the Spanish capital and caused indignation around the rest of the country.

This campaign from Perez may have lacked the bravado of that in 2000 when he won the election by signing Barcelona's most emblematic player of the time, Luis Figo, but the impact is likely to be as considerable.

Real stumbled to the end of the season with a caretaker president, Vicente Boluda, and coach Juande Ramos unable to motivate his players once Barcelona had moved over the horizon in the league.

To give full justice to Ramos, his arrival at the end of last year led to a run of 17 wins in 18 matches, which saw Real keep on the shoulders of Barcelona, but the stunning 6-2 destruction by Barca at the Bernabeu ended the championship race and emphasised the difference in class.

As Barca imperiously went on to win the league and cup followed by their Champions League victory in Rome, Real were left wondering where it had gone wrong.

Their only answer was to look to Perez as their salvation and his promise of returning success to the club, forgetting that only a few years before he had left in failure.

Standing down in February, 2006, he admitted with the team ten points adrift, that his policy of expensive signings had not worked.

Perez followed up the transfer of Figo with Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo and David Beckham in a policy which supposedly mixed these players with youth products.

But most of the players coming from the Real academy were forced to leave and while the club did enjoy the success of two domestic league titles and one Champions League, between 2003 and 2006 they failed to win a major trophy.

With the signings of Kaka and Ronaldo, along with Zidane and Figo previously, Perez has now overseen the four most expensive signings of all time and Valencia's David Villa appears to be close to following them to the Bernabeu in what would be another sizeable fee.

Real were also looking to raid Valencia for David Silva and Raul Albiol, with the latter appearing the more likely to move as the club from the Mestalla claim Silva is non-transferable.

Especially with the poor state of the defence last season it will be interesting to see whether Perez, a second time round, will pay more attention to the backline, with a replacement for Fabio Cannavaro at centre-half a priority

The reaction from treble winners Barcelona has been incredulity at the amount of money spent and the possiblity that Perez could take his summer spending up to 300 million euros.

The big question is where is he getting the money from?

"I don't know where this amount of money which Florentino Perez plans to spend on players is coming from, he says he will recover it by selling shirts but that means he will have to sell 30 million shirts," said Barca director Xavier Sala i Martin.

"We would never pay 65million for a player you can be sure, for that amount of money you could have bought the whole of the side which won the Champions League in Rome.

"Someone is giving him the money and it would be good to know who. How is it that a football team has all this money when you consider the current economic climate and the credit restrictions which banks have put in place."

There was considerable controversy at the start of Perez's first spell as president when he used money from the sale of the club's sports complex in the centre of Madrid, which had been given to Real by the local government, to finance the galacticos.

Now there is a suspicion that Perez, the owner of a major construction company in Spain, has now similarly found another way to bring in finance.