It is the destiny of Real Madrid. He may navigate the season brooding and disoriented, still unable to fit the most desired footballer into the most successful team, but he sniffs out a trophy and catches it. He left only a small stretch of hope for the Mexican Pachuca, far from the level of the whites, and launched himself with increasing voracity for the cup. Mbappé does not look as expected, but in the stadium where he had dazzled just two years before in the final of the last World Cup, he scored, as he did in the European Super Cup in his debut as a Real Madrid player. Two finals, two goals. Real, once again driven by Vinicius and Bellingham, closes 2024 apparently disoriented, but with five titles, a third of the 15 that Ancelotti, the most awarded coach in the history of the most awarded club, has won.
3
Thibaut Courtois, Fran García, Antonio Rüdiger, Lucas Vázquez (Raúl, min. 87), Aurélien Tchouaméni, Federico Valverde, Jude Bellingham (Arda Güler, min. 87), Vinícius Júnior, Rodrygo (Luka Modric, min. 69), Eduardo Camavinga (Dani Ceballos, min. 61) and Kylian Mbappé (Brahim Diaz, min. 61)
0
Carlos Moreno, Luis Rodríguez (Carlos Sánchez, min. 74), Sergio Barreto, Bryan González, Andrés Micolta, Pedro Pedraza, Nelson Deossa (Sergio Hernández, min. 88), Oussama Idrissi (Alexéi Domínguez, min. 87), Alán Bautista (Ángel Mena, min. 74), Elías Montiel and Salomón Rondón
Goals
1-0 min. 36: Kylian Mbappe. 2-0 min. 52: Rodrygo. 3-0 min. 83: Vinicius Junior
Referee Jesus Valenzuela
yellow cards
Pedro Pedraza (min. 50), Rondón (min. 92)
They came to Qatar to establish their place on the football planet, in the tournament of continental champions, an extension of the Wembley Champions League, and from the start they showed a kind of lame reluctance. They missed simple passes, missed school controls, and moved with the slowness and heaviness of a recently woken pachyderm. Pachuca beat at a different rhythm. For the Mexican team, even more in crisis in its domestic tournament, it was the game of a lifetime, an infinite prize. He went for it trying to drown Madrid from high up. And that sleepy Madrid seemed to let itself be done. The first shot was registered by Luis Rodríguez, who forced Courtois to stretch.
Ancelotti became desperate on the wing. What their footballers showed was even more disconcerting than the poverty at the beginning of the year. Logic said that the night was an invitation to pick up another drink, and they seemed to want to skip the game.
Pachuca, apart from with inflamed enthusiasm, had appeared at the event very exhausted, after eliminating Botafogo, winner of the Libertadores, and Al Ahly, the African champion, in the quarterfinals after an extra time and some agonizing penalties in those who were lost. It was a consumed group despite the boost of Idrissi’s quality in the middle and Rondón’s insistent efforts at the top. They deflated in parallel to the Camavinga flood, which swept the center with implacable energy.
Also at the same time that Real found Bellingham between the lines. English is the piece that connects and lubricates Madrid. Mbappé, Rodrygo and Vinicius began to appear around him. The day after winning FIFA’s The Best award, the Brazilian shook up the game not through dribbling and vertigo, but through passing, a record in which he continues to grow in an extraordinary way.
Real sank the declining Pachuca and stung with the depth of their deliveries. Until Valverde found Bellingham between the lines again and the Englishman threw Vinicius into space into the area, who began to dance: a bicycle left the goalkeeper with his knee on the ground, from where he then tried to chase the dribble outward by crawling. The Brazilian reached the baseline and kicked the ball back for Mbappé to score, who entered the eleven despite retiring injured just eight days earlier. Madrid began to tie the knot on its second title of the season with a play by the Brazilian almost identical to the one he made in the 1-0 of the European Super Cup in Warsaw, where it was Valverde who made his pass behind.
The goal was another small release for Mbappé, who soon threw a rabona near the center of the field. He seemed happier and more active in those central areas where Bellingham also appeared. It was the control room from where Madrid was built. A touch from the Frenchman there for Rodrygo led to the next goal. The Brazilian dribbled along the front until he found the angle to place the thread. After almost three months of injuries and drought, he scored for the second consecutive game, after doing so on Saturday in Vallecas.
At Pachuca, Rondón, endless at 35 years old, refused to see his last great dream disappear and tested Courtois with a distant free kick and a powerful header. It was just two flashes when Madrid had already entered a recreational phase, increasingly fun with a playful and virguero Vinicius. He stayed one-on-one with the goalkeeper twice, shot wide from the edge of the area and ended up taking a poorly taken penalty that bent the goalkeeper’s hand and slipped into the net.
It was another of those games that contain the essence of Madrid: it pauses or hesitates for as long as it can afford, until it identifies the decisive moment and crushes it with a waste of relentless quality. And he lifts another trophy, a world one, while he seems to continue doubting.
