Football's Secret Trade. Panja Tariq

littered with nutshells and paper napkins on the floor and serving tortilla, café con leche and beer made at the brewery a few hundred metres away.

      During Madrid's stifling hot summers, Jesús would leave half of his shirt buttons undone to reveal a gold medallion as he puffed on a fat cigar. Once, at a formal dinner with other football club executives, he boasted that his first job was working in a brothel (as the bookkeeper). He went through as many as 25 coaches in 16 years as president. “For me, firing a coach is like having a beer,” he once said. “I could kick out 20 in one year, 100 if necessary.”

      When Miguel Ángel Gil was a five-year-old schoolboy, his father served 18 months in prison after the roof of a restaurant in a tourism complex he built 50 miles outside Madrid collapsed in 1969, killing 58 guests. The cement hadn't been given enough time to dry. Gil and his brothers were told that their father was away in a hotel, before they were old enough to know better.

      Gil avoided serving more than half of the sentence thanks to a pardon from Franco, the dictator. He resurfaced in politics, becoming mayor of Marbella on a promise to cut crime and clean up the city's sleazy image.

      Jesús Gil's stint in charge of Atlético was peppered with controversy. In 1989 he called French referee Michel Vautron a “maricón” (poofter) when Atlético was eliminated from the UEFA Cup by Fiorentina. Seven years later, he thumped another club's executive outside the league headquarters.

      “You are a crook,” Gil told his opposite number at Compostela. “And you're a son of a bitch,” came the reply. Gil's riposte was a right-hander. Separated by two of Gil's bodyguards, they exchanged insults for two minutes while they climbed the stairs to the first-floor boardroom. All the while, kickback scandals mounted in Marbella. He shrugged them off until he died of a heart attack in 2004, aged 71.

      The second of four children, Miguel Ángel Gil is altogether different from his roguish father. A former veterinary student, he is shy and avoids public appearances. He escapes from the pressures of managing the club's parlous finances by rearing horses, bulls, deer, birds and boars on a 2,000-acre estate near Ávila, 70 miles outside Madrid. He has one vice in common with his father: spending on player transfers. Gil was betting that his investment in signing talent would pay off, pushing Atlético higher up the standings. In turn that would trigger more prize money, and better ticket sales and sponsorships. It was a high-stakes roulette game that he could not afford to lose.

      This business model continued to be accepted by Spanish authorities, but worried European ruling body UEFA that was indirectly financing Atlético through prize money from the Champions League and Europa League.

      Gil's bartering to sign new players would come to a head as the end-of-summer deadline approached. On 30 August 2010, a day before the trading window shut, Gil had an €11 million bid faxed to Galatasaray for midfielder Arda Turan on a single piece of A4 paper. The Turkish club rejected the offer, proudly showing off the fax to fans as proof. However, it relented for €12 million a year later and Turan was on his way to Atlético.

      The signing was typical of how Gil spent money he didn't have. Atlético's cash reserves amounted to barely 5 % of its €543 million debt. For the year to July 2010, just before bidding for Turan the first time around, Atlético posted a whopping €76 million loss. It was so stretched that it was late paying more than one-third of its bills, and Gil was forced to use his country house as collateral to obtain a bank loan.

      Even if it was under the cosh and languishing mid-table in La Liga, Atlético was beginning to enjoy a rare patch of success in European competition under coach Enrique “Quique” Sanchez Flores, the son of an actress and nephew of a famed flamenco artist.

      The high-society coach with impeccable dress sense led Atlético to the second-tier Europa League in 2010 by beating Fulham 2-1 in the final. Hugh Grant, the English actor who supported the London team, was among the crowd watching the final in Hamburg. Grant put his head in his hands as Diego Forlan scored the winning goal with four minutes of extra time remaining. In the centre of Madrid, Atlético fans converged on the Plaza Neptuno to serenade players including striker Sergio Agüero and Forlan. It was Atlético's first continental trophy since 1962.

      Agüero was soon traded to Manchester City to help service the club's debt, with half of the €36 million transfer fee going to the Spanish tax agency.

      Two years later, Atlético defeated Athletic Bilbao 3-0 in the Europa League final to win the title again, this time with another up-and-coming South American striker, Radamel Falcão, leading the forward line. A pattern was beginning to emerge. Gil would take on an ace young forward from South America, let him show off his talents in Europe and then trade him to a profit on the transfer market. Falcão would move on to Monaco for a €43 million fee.

      The two Europa Cup wins brought Atlético €32 million in prize money from UEFA, boosting the club's income by more than 30 %. But was it fair that the club continued to spend so much money on the transfer market when teams in some of Europe's other biggest leagues in the UK and Germany, such as Liverpool and Hannover, which they had defeated on the field, had to scrupulously pay their debts on time?

      The European authorities were closing in on the Spanish government's laissez-faire attitude to Atlético's tax debt. The European Commission announced that it was opening an investigation into whether Atlético was receiving state aid by deferring its already-late tax payments.

      On another front, the former France playmaker Michel Platini was tightening up oversight of team finances to try and create a more level playing field in UEFA competitions. Platini had parlayed a successful playing career into becoming a football administrator and was now UEFA president. It was the two-time European footballer of the year who had handed over the Europa League trophy to Atlético Madrid's victorious players in 2010 and 2012.

      Platini, who had once painted over the three Adidas stripes on his football boots, saw himself as a traditionalist. He was suspicious of the money being pumped into European leagues by billionaires like Roman Abramovich, who bought Chelsea in 2003, and Malcolm Glazer, who took control of Manchester United in 2005. When he became UEFA president Platini wrote to the leaders of the European Union's 27 member nations asking them to protect football from “the malign and ever-present” influence of money.