Madrid played at the Bernabéuas if facing the last game of the course. With a sense of urgency as inappropriate as it is unnecessary for this point in the season. There was a tough soul and leg, but also anxiety, imprecision and a point of desperation. City ended up imposing themselves naturally … : Madrid lacked football. A lot of football. Between grief and nothingness, he chose nothingness.
The defeat, beyond the score, left a familiar feeling: that of a team that has been in a permanent state of exception for some time. Any adversity is perceived as a fire and any match is played as if it were a final without tomorrow. That tension, which was once fuel, today seems like noise. And the noise, when it is not accompanied by play, becomes a burden on the legs of some footballers, shadows of what they once were.
Their place among the top eight in Europe is in jeopardy because they have been far behind the eight best teams in Europe for two seasons. The situation does not deserve a much deeper analysis. The rest are excuses. When one of your wingers scores a goal and it becomes a newsworthy event, it is a sign that something is not going too well. That the current Rodrygo Goes was the best on the team yesterday paints a really unflattering picture. Vinícius, for example, completed a very poor match when it was most expected of him, with Mbappé as a prop on the bench. And Bellingham is looking for an identity on the countryside, lost in no man’s land.
Meanwhile, Madrid continues to take refuge in the referee’s alibi every time a setback appears. The victimist discourse has permeated the fans and part of the locker room. For some players, protest is already their mother tongue: hands to the sky, angry gesture, constant fuss.
The easy way out is to point to Xabi Alonso, insist on the refereeing conspiracy and continue looking the other way. The difficult one (the salmon one, as Calamaro would say) consists of sitting Vinícius down, speaking to him clearly, raising the demand a notch in manners, in manners, and regaining control of the situation. Because without that internal change, no slate, no signing and no regrets are going to correct what is a structural problem right now.
Madrid has time to rebuild, but to do so it needs a dose of self-criticism that it has not practiced for a long time. And show a real and determined commitment to your coach, not to the players. Otherwise, they will continue playing finals in December, protesting every decision and inevitably falling into the place where teams that confuse personality with noise fall: far from Europe and even further from themselves.
