Lorenzo Sanz, Who Led Comeback of Real Madrid, Dies at 76

After the team won the Champions League in 2000, Mr. Sanz decided to hold an early election, but the move backfired. He was defeated by Mr. Pérez by just over 3,000 votes among the club’s 100,000 members, who pay an annual fee and hold the right to elect the club’s president.

He then tried unsuccessfully twice to regain the presidency, also failing in a bid to take over Parma, the Italian club that had been plunged into crisis by Parmalat, the dairy company that collapsed in one of Italy’s biggest fraud scandals.

Instead, in 2006, Mr. Sanz bought the Spanish club of Málaga, which he then sold four years later to a member of Qatar’s ruling family.

In recent years, Mr. Sanz ran into legal problems linked to his business deals and tax payments. In 2018, he was sentenced by a Madrid provincial court to three years in prison and a fine of 1.2 million euros for tax evasion. But his appeal dragged on and he did not go to jail.

Mr. Sanz is the most prominent person to have died from the coronavirus in Spain, which has been the European country worst hit after Italy. In an interview this week with the Cope radio station, his son Fernando said that his father had tried to battle the fever at home for eight days, before finally going to hospital, because he didn’t want to burden a Spanish health system already strained by the number of coronavirus patients.

In addition to his son Fernando, Mr. Sanz is survived by his wife, Mari Luz; his other sons Lorenzo and Francisco, and his daughters Diana and Malula, who is married to a former Spanish soccer star, Míchel Salgado.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/obituaries/lorenzo-sanz-dead.html