Getty Image / Oscar J. Barroso / Europa Press
Pep Guardiola‘s Manchester City was in Madrid on Tuesday for their first clash against Real Madrid in the Champions League quarterfinals. During his playing days, Guardiola was a star with Real Madrid’s arch-nemesis Barcelona and certainly has no love for the crowd at Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu Stadium.
During the game, Guardiola subtly flexed on the 81K+ fans in attendance by wearing a Richard Mille RM27-01 watch worth $1 million. There are only 50 of the Richard Mille ‘Tourbillon Rafael Nadal’ timepieces in the world and Pep Guardiola has one of them.
Guardiola has an impressive watch collection that also includes a Richard Mille RM 010 ‘Manchester City’ in City Blue ($100K) along with a RM 022 Tourbillon Aerodyne ($580K+). He also owns/wears multiple models of Rolex, IWC, Chopard, A. Lange & Söhne, and more. But the Richard Mille ‘Tourbillon Rafael Nadal’ RM27-01 is certainly the jewel of his collection:
Getty Image / Harry Langer / DeFodi Images
Here is another close up of Pep’s insane watch:
Getty Image / Oscar J. Barroso / Europa Press
The retail price of Pep Guardiola’s Richard Mille RM27-01 Tourbillon Rafael Nadal watch was believed to be around $750K but the actual value of it has risen over the years and $1 million is a conservative estimate. It’s likely the RM27-01 Tourbillon Rafael Nadal would sell for somewhere between $1.5 and $2 million on the open market.
The watch was released by Richard Mille back in 2013 with the aim of setting a new world record for the lightest lightest mechanical watch ever built. It only weighs 18.83 grams. As a point of comparison, an average dinner fork weighs 48.1 grams. So it is incredibly light, light enough to the point that professional athletes like Rafael Nadal can actually wear it while competing.
The Richard Mille website has a detailed description of how they were able to achieve the world record with this watch.
Its case has an anthracite color due to the “high concentration of carbon nanotubes” in the construction. The baseplate is attached by four braided steel cables that measure just 0.35 mm in diameter and only weigh 3.5g due to the use of grade 5 titanium.
Did Manchester City win the game? No. It was a 3-3 tie and they’ll face off again in Manchester next week with the winner moving on to the Champions League semifinals. But, did Pep Guardiola have the most expensive watch of anyone in the stadium? He sure did.
Seeing a Richard Mille watch up close can be a transformative experience. Meta CEO and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg recently caught eyes of Anant Ambani’s Richard Mille and it turned Zuckerberg into a watch guy. And for what it’s worth, Anant Ambani owns one of the other 50 ichard Mille RM27-01 Tourbillon Rafael Nadal’s in the world.