It was quite a scene at the Bernabeu stadium on Saturday night. As Barcelona repeatedly humiliated their opposition with the ball, with their technique and with their work rate, the home fans turned. "Florentino dimision" they chanted all around the stadium, and I can assure you, ESPN FC readers, that it was not started every time by the fierce Ultra Sur brigade of undesirables that Florentino has, justifiably, tried to prevent from entering the stadium if they can't behave in a socially acceptable way.
The chants began four or five times throughout the game and during post-match, and the hard fact is that the "Florentino resign" chorus began in different parts of the Bernabeu each time, catching like wildfire.
Please ignore the Madrid president's attempts in his Monday night discourse to suggest that it was limited, that it spread in mere copycat style and that it's part of a campaign to destabilise him by those he'd ban from the stadium.
Not so.
Anyway, vocal discontent was accompanied by that most Spanish phenomenon, the Panolada, where, traditionally, white handkerchiefs are waved in the air to signal disgust and protest. (The gesture has its roots in bullfighting and was originally aimed at a matador who'd shown a lack of class, bravery or elegance in his one-on-one with the bull.)
In retrospect, Florentino may regret that their pre-match spectacle was based giving some 80,000 white plastic squares to the fans so they could hold them up during the Madrid anthem. Spectacular enough in the moment, extremely handy for those who didn't have a hankie when Madrid were 3-0 down and needed something white to wave in fury.
My point is that when this chant of "Florentino RESIGN!" reached its apogee the multi-millionaire industrialist turned toward his subjects (which is, without question, how he views them) and shrugged his shoulders with arms extended out in front of him in the world-wide gesture of: What is it you want me to do? How is this my fault?
And there, ladies and gentlemen, you have Florentino Perez.
His work when it goes well. Someone else's fault when it goes badly.
Obviously, I don't know which of those Madridistas who were singing their discontent are club members and which are not. So perhaps there wasn't one of them with a guilty conscience.
But, frankly, the real fault for Madrid's underlying problems belongs to their
Florentino is programmed to behave this way, he has never hidden his touchstone concepts, nor has he ever promised to change. He is, without any question, the principal obstacle facing Madrid fans who yearn to have what Barcelona possess and have possessed since 2003 -- a philosophy, a system, core footballing beliefs, a template to which they can recur in times of trouble, superlative technical skills, consistency and the adoration of the football world.
The simple fact of not possessing these things is hard enough to bear for a magnificent, successful, exciting and important club like Real Madrid. But when their most bitter, most implacable rivals do have all those things it becomes indescribably sore, embarrassing and annoying.
Florentino Perez's buy big, sack quickly philosophy has brought highs -- Jose Mourinho's title win of 2012 stemmed from seven or eight months of genuine record-breaking excellence while La Decima itself, won in Lisbon and in extremis against Atletico, was a truly thrilling campaign.
But Madrid is a fiefdom, run on the president's will and whim. Which means that Madrid have spent the last few years zig-zagging around frantically looking to prove that Barcelona's success is nothing to impress, nothing to mimic, nothing to learn from. Florentino Perez innately believes that there's a fundamental worth in buying shiny new players and that if the window display is sexy, the value of what's actually in the shop -- workmanship, reliability, staff service and value for money -- ain't all that relevant.
His business empire benefits from the tinsel and sparkle associated with procuring the world's biggest names -- not from seeding them in the Madrid nursery and letting them grow. To empresarios like him, there's a thrill in the act of exercising power. By which I mean the shock and awe of repeatedly spending €70, €80, €90, or €100 million for the biggest new name in football and proving that Madrid can sign whomever they want -- Cristiano Ronaldo, James Rodriguez, Gareth Bale, Toni Kroos, Luka Modric and Isco in the recent past.
But this approach lacks soul and sustainability, a diet of ice-cream and soft-drinks without sufficient nutrition and vitamins.
For those in far-flung parts around the globe who buy shirts, urge their countries to buy the television rights to watch Madrid, who pay for summer tour matches, for the masses who encourage sponsors to invest in Los Blancos, all this is often sufficient. That vast Madrid diaspora around the world are not those, for the most part, who are genuinely suffering during the Florentino years.
It's the hard-core lifelong Spain-based Madridistas who are finally beginning to realise that the club is on a hamster wheel. No sooner has the four-pawed, hard-running cage-bound house-pet reached the top of the wheel (victory!) that the same momentum will automatically take it downwards again.
In fact I'd say that the boom-bust model is one to which Florentino is not only philosophically attached but it's one which almost becomes vital. If there's no bust, then there's no need for a boom when Good Sir Florentino rides to the rescue with another couple of hundred million worth of purchases -- let's say Eden Hazard, David De Gea, Robert Lewandowski and Philippe Coutinho next.
Yet, as bad as some parts of Madrid's display were on Saturday there were several things to indicate that this could be a trophy winning squad.
Playing badly, Los Blancos still created at least three very scoreable chances. On a normal night, Ronaldo and Karim Benzema probably hit the net two or three times from their array of headers and one-vs-one chances.
Once Casemiro is returned to a midfield from which he should never have been detached, the oceans of space enjoyed by Sergi Roberto and Andres Iniesta to create will run dry.
Moreover, I thought that, while James Rodriguez scoring twice after his injury absence (at Sevilla and for Colombia in World Cup qualifying) made it easy to argue that he was right in demanding to be back in the team more quickly, some of his performance against Barcelona underlined Rafa Benitez's correct, if unpopular point of view. Two weeks ago the coach said that he saw James still well off the match sharpness and stamina needed to return to the starting XI.
Yet James started and was clearly a weak link, including when the Colombian simply let Iniesta wander away before he scored one of the top three goals of his life to give Barca a then 3-0 lead.
It all leads to three big questions: Why didn't Casemiro start? Why wasn't Casemiro brought on? Why did James start the second half when he was clearly physically shot?
Add to that the fact that Danilo was given a footballing lesson from start to finish by Neymar and it's hard to comprehend why Dani Carvajal didn't replace him at halftime instead of the 59th minute.
Whatever Benitez was trying to achieve, this wasn't a good night from the Madrid coach.
This team is on a knife's edge because Benitez is a good enough coach and Madrid have sufficient talent that this can, at least temporarily, be put right if the manager tempers his manner and if the high-maintenance players get behind him. The points I wrote about last week, emerging youth talent, Keylor Navas' form, Casemiro's excellence and the push to match fitness of Benzema, James and Bale still offer the chance for Madrid to be extremely competitive.
Knife's edge, of course, also implies that if the players abandon him physically and mentally then Benitez could easily be out by Christmas.
But Benitez is not the core problem. No matter what he achieves now my bet is that he doesn't last at the club beyond this summer -- at best.
This was a humiliation sufficient for Florentino Perez to spin the wheel again and come up with Zinedine Zidane (coach of Real's Castilla) or Jose Mourinho as an imminent solution.
What will remain, however, is the dominance of a business strategy over a football strategy.
Madrid's pursuit from one new shiny toy to the next will sometimes succeed, but most often will fail. In the last nine years of Florentino in charge, Real Madrid have won just one La Liga title. Hello Madrid socios. If you had known then, what you know now, would you have cast your vote the same way?
Florentino will continue to take decisions like sacking Vicente Del Bosque, selling Claude Makelele without the coach's consent, rejecting Gabi Milito because he won't help the club's marketing, selling Angel Di Maria, selling Madrid's dominant share in Samuel Eto'o to Barcelona, endorsing Mourinho's scorched earth policy, allowing the hanging out to dry of a club legend like Iker Casillas, telling fans that Luis Suarez isn't a good enough footballer and ploughing through coach after coach -- even the one who actually won La Decima, Carlo Ancelotti.
If this boom-and-bust approach is what the majority of Madrid's fans want, then fine. It's their club. But for those of us who respect Madrid's place in the football firmament, who yearn to see more of the kind of sumptuous football Barcelona have been playing for so long now, it's not good enough.
Not even close.