There are few things more interesting and stupid, and to which we dedicate more time and resources when it comes to football, than psychoanalyzing Real Madrid. In reality, writing about football already has a melancholic and absurd weight that, speaking from memory, I think David Trueba resolved by telling how useless it was to write about a match if, in the end, everything would depend on the result: how unfair it can be with some players or a coach if, after doing everything well, a mistake, bad luck or a referee ruling condemned them to defeat. Trying to do it with Madrid is even more fun, if possible: a club whose glory in the 21st century is based on a header at the end of stoppage time in a horrible Champions League final that it had lost and that implied unknown consequences (“if we lose “We cannot return to Madrid,” a manager had said on the outward trip). Being a team that wins so many times by playing worse than its rival, how can we distinguish its true state when it loses? The season is tragic and has five defeats: Lille (1-0), Barcelona (0-4), Milan (1-3), Liverpool (2-0) and Athletic de Bilbao (2-1). They have won a European title, the Super Cup, and are second in the League with one less game which, if won, would put them at the top. There are two serious alarms: continuity in the Champions League and injuries. And a depressive state in a good part of the fans who, orphaned of great victories, have begun to celebrate that Mbappé has abs.
For all this, trying to draw conclusions from the victory against Girona is trying to draw them from the defeat in Liverpool, where the penalty in favor of Madrid, as in Bilbao, could have changed the result. You never know what to expect from Madrid except that it will always be there, no matter how you play or whoever you play with. The two left backs are – today, right now, we don’t know tomorrow – from a mid-table team, and that happens in a band in which Vinicius or Mbappé are dynamite and that was occupied in the last thirty years by Roberto Carlos and Marcelo . The right back is not better. Is it a problem? Sometimes it can even be a virtue, don’t ask me how. In Manchester we took out guys who had taken two penalties in twenty years to shoot and, upon seeing them, the English goalkeeping coach had to ask what their names were: how do those guys’ penalties get saved? What statistics do you give us? to come if the last penalty that Lucas took was nine years ago in a Champions League final and with more pachorra? Life is complicated and Madrid is the most suitable club to live it with the meaninglessness it deserves.
In football you must always respect verb tenses. For example, Mbappé. You have to write about players like Mbappé after the games are over, never before. Of the same that we can say since Bellingham is a successful signing that promises everything that is seen in the future, of Mbappé it cannot be said that it was a bad signing or a disastrous signing, unless he was brought in for the first quarter . One of Madrid’s problems is Mbappé’s connection not with the team, as disconnected as he is, but with the opposing goal. Sometimes it looks like one of those bombs that did not explode in a war that you do not know if it is recent, and will explode at any moment, or from a century ago, and can be handled with joy. Believing the second is reckless.
