Alan Waxman

They needed to do something.

Joan Laporta, incredible human, as well as Florentino, two people I've become friends with through the Real Madrid and FC Barcelona process.

They were trying to pull levers to basically be able to keep their roster together because their view was, if we lose key components of the roster, we won't be able to stay competitive.

And you can see how they've done since then.

But that's sort of how those deals came about.

They say, this is what we're trying to solve.

We're investing a bunch of money into the Bernabeu Stadium.

So this is the use of funds.

So what structures?

They didn't want to do debt.

So we had to do effectively an equity joint venture with them.

We come up with solutions.

We price those solutions.

We say, look, here's option A, here's option B, here's option C. They say, we kind of like a combination of option A and option B. We go back to the drawing board.

We come back and we say, here's a hybrid of option A and option B, which is what happened on that deal.

For every deal, they're different.

If it's an equity deal, obviously price.

If it's a hybrid deal where it's convertible deal, there's a yield component and a strike component.

If it's just a private credit deal, it's just a yield component.

Sometimes when we're doing joint venture, we're like, what are the value added operations in that case?