But why do you think Florentino Perez has seen this 2026 version of Jose Mourinho as the man to revive the fortunes of Real Madrid?

I think he's betting on a second stint because Ancelotti worked in that second stint.

Ancelotti was a very similar case.

He was coaching Everton, probably not at the top of his game anymore, 60-some, and suddenly he worked again for Real Madrid and won the Champions League.

So, I think Mourinho falls into the category of Real Madrid being not a manager's club, but a player's club.

And even though Mourinho is a very significant manager, but the way he manages is not tactical intense, but more player's intense, which is what I believe Florentino needs, the club needs now.

How are the fans feeling about it then, Eduardo? You could say that the Real Madrid fans are split, have been split since Mourinho was at the club in the early 2010s.

They're amazing players, but you've got to fit them in somehow, haven't you? And create a style, surely, for these players to flourish.

And then AI, how do you look at this from your perspective?

What we've seen is this is not a technology-only tool.

If you think of it as an area that IT leads, you're only catching, I would say, 30% of what it implies.

And I say this because you can think of uses of use cases for pretty much every employee in the bank because it implies a change in the way we work that would fall short if we just stick to technology.

There's so many change management to do here and so many cross projects that impact operations and front office.

There's not a single area of the bank that is not being touched by AI.

So what we did in Santander was split the AI area and the data area.

And then how do you decide what to work on and how do you drive that? Because you have to drive that change, I guess, with IT along the way and into different parts of the organization, right?

Yeah.

Uh, he's got some Ultras Sur.

Uh, he's been, uh, seen with a few of the old Ultras Sur that's, that were, uh, expelled from the stadium.

Um, there's some political associations that are not, uh...

Every, at, at that level, everyone has, uh, two or three, uh, sketchy friendships that, uh, you have to, you have to look the other way at, uh, uh, at, at some point.

But I think he's been fresh in some, in some terms.

He's been very energetic, very adamant that he wants to do this.

Do you have any stories from that era that you wanna share?

What first drew you to them?

I was doing wildlife inventories for a hydroelectric dam in the Caroní River in southern Venezuela.

Uh, some local people told me about these very large eagles.

When I look in the literature and then the, you know, the Venezuelan bird guide, it was a very small entry.

Hardly anything was known.

It was basically a cryptic species only known in encyclopedias.

This was in the, uh, early '80s.

What kind of technology can you use?