The real deal

Forty years after a spotlighted football gathering, two teams have decided to reunite. Alaa Shahine reports
In 1961, the famed Real Madrid football team visited Egypt upon an invitation from Zamalek to play a friendly encounter against a mixed Zamalek and Ahli squad at Cairo Stadium. On the pitch were big names in soccer world like the Argentinean legend Alfredo De Stefano, Spanish marvel Gento and the famed Hungarian striker Puskas. Although the match ended with Real Madrid giving the Egyptian side a 7-2 drubbing, the match was considered a great football day celebrated nationwide.
The following year, Ahli invited Portuguese giants Benfica who were newly crowned winners of the European Champions League. The match ended with a surprising 3-2 victory for Ahli at a sold-out Cairo Stadium.
Forty years later, Ahli decided to rekindle the moments again.
Earlier this week, Ahli's management signed an agreement with Real Madrid whereby the Spanish team shall play a friendly match with Ahli on August the fourth at Cairo Stadium for a sizable $1.5.
The idea of a friendly match between Ahli and one of the football club powerhouses came after the club was selected as Africa's Club of the Century by the African Football Confederation (CAF) earlier this year. Initial brain storming brought Real Madrid's name on top of the list, given that the Spanish club is preparing to celebrate its centenary. And while the prospects of both sides reaching an agreement seemed, in the beginning, dim due to the Spanish sky- rocketing financial demands, negotiations masterminded by Ahli's treasurer, Ibrahim El-Moalim, saw the deal being cemented officially last Saturday.
According to the agreement, Real Madrid will play in Cairo with their full power that includes world's football idols like FIFA's Player of the Year Zinedine Zidane, Portugal's Luis Figo -- who was voted as the world's best player in the year 2000 by French football magazine France Football -- and Spain's golden boy Raul Gonzales. The Spanish team will arrive at Cairo International Airport on August the third and leave right after the match.
Founded in 1902, Real Madrid are arguably the best football team in the history of the game. Apart from a FIFA decision to that effect in 1998, a basket-full of local, continental and world titles are concrete proof. From an inauspicious 3-1 defeat at the hands of Barcelona in their first season, through the legendary and first truly international club sides of the 1950s and 1960s, a 32-- year wait to regain the European Cup and the most recent crushing of their traditional rival Barcelona, the club has come to symbolise Spanish football and, for some, Spain itself.
Along with 28 league titles, 17 cup trophies and four Spanish Super Cup titles, the team boast of winning a record eight European Champions League and two UEFA Cup titles. At the international level, the team, known in Spain as the Blancos (the whites) earned two Intercontinental Cup titles in 1960 and 1998.
According to onefootball.com, Real came to international prominence at the same time as Spanish football made an impact on the World Cups of the 1950s. This was the era in which the country was emerging from the "años de hambre" (years of hunger) that followed World War II, mass tourism was just beginning and General Franco used Real Madrid's success as a mechanism for presenting Western Europe's last dictatorship in a favourable light.
Even after General Franco died, the club maintained its supremacy as one of the richest football institutions in the country and the world until the 1990s when it faced, under former club president Lorenzo Sanz, an acute financial crisis. However, discreet financial policies by Florentino Peres, who took the helm of the club last year, brought stability back to the club and helped in two of the biggest signs in the history of football. Shortly after Peres was elected as the new club president in the year 2000, he signed in Portuguese marvel Luis Figo from their arch rivals Barcelona for $56.1m in the most expensive transfer throughout football history at that time. One year later, however, the club's name came again to make sports headlines after its interest in Zidane who shattered Figo's record by a landslide, joining Real from Italy's Juventus for an unbelievable $65m transfer fee.
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