Real Madrid’s Age of Inevitability began a little after 9.30pm Lisbon time on May 24th, 2014, when Sergio Ramos met Luka Modric’s corner with a bullet header to level the Champions League final against Atletico Madrid.
With Atleti heartbroken and exhausted by the 93rd-minute equaliser, Madrid rampaged to a 4-1 win. Afterwards some pundits criticised Atletico’s failure to mark Ramos. Who else did they expect was going to be the goal threat at that set-piece?
Back then we still tried to explain Madrid’s victories in rational terms. Now we know not to waste time trying to understand. Just accept. In the 2024 final Dani Carvajal, the smallest man on the pitch, scorer of three headers in his previous 519 matches, headed the winning goal from a corner. What else can you say but . . . Real Madrid.
A how-to-win-finals guide based on Madrid’s performance against Borussia Dortmund at Wembley would go: start slowly, demoralise your opponents by letting them miss a few chances, then score from a set-piece and an opponent’s mistake.
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The method wouldn’t work for every team, but Madrid’s juju works on everybody – a self-fulfilling prophecy that herds the Madrid players, their opponents, the supporters, and the opposing supporters towards the same inevitable outcome. Six European titles in 11 seasons is the most dominant period enjoyed by any club since the Madrid of Di Stefano and Puskas monopolised the trophy in the 1950s and 1960s.
The only problem with knowing you’re going to win is losing a little bit of the excitement that usually accompanies victory. “I think that we are already focused on the next one. We want the 16th,” said Florentino Perez amid the Wembley celebrations, straying over the fine line that separates “winner’s mentality” and “utter joylessness”. Madrid knew this cup was in the bag long before the second goal that killed Dortmund off. Realistically, they knew it when Manuel Neuer spilled Vinicius Jr’s shot to Joselu at the Bernabeu on May 8th.
Perez might be more excited about the arrival this week of his new galactico. It would be an exaggeration to say that the president is the only person at Real Madrid who wants to sign Kylian Mbappé, but there are senior figures at the club who doubt whether this is the right move at the right time.
Mbappé plays the same position as Vini Jr, who has just had a better season than him and is Perez’s tip for the Ballon D’Or: are Madrid about to replace their best player? Mbappé apparently wants to play for Madrid as a 9, but if that doesn’t work out – and it hasn’t thus far in his career – then others, including Vini, will have to adapt to his requirements.
Still, whatever about Mbappé's compatibility with this Madrid line-up there’s no doubting his ability. Dortmund knocked his team out in the semi, but Mbappé might have seized the chances that slipped from their grasp on Saturday night.
The truth is it was a poor final, only redeemed from utter forgettability by the noise, drums, fire and smoke of the BVB fans.
Coach Edin Terzic said afterwards that 100,000 Dortmund fans had travelled to London. If the Madrid fans were there to watch their team win, the BVB fans were there to show the world the meaning of Dortmund football. To witness the BVB crowd bouncing in the stands as they roar on their team is to feel the glory and greatness of the game. Which is why German arms industry giant Rheinmetall is now paying to bask in the reflected glory of the Yellow Wall.
Rheinmetall built and supplied the German war machine through both World Wars. Today the firm is the world’s top manufacturer of large-calibre ammunition and produces a range of armaments including the Panther main battle tank and other fighting vehicles, artillery, air defence systems, drones, etc.
They announced a three-year sponsorship deal with BVB on May 29th.
Becoming a billboard for the arms industry is presumably not the future Dortmund envisaged in the Jürgen Klopp days, when they built one of the most popular football brands in the world around the slogan “Echte Liebe” – True Love.
On Saturday night the Dortmund fans displayed three banners: “Rheinmetall: Mit dem Fußball zum Saubermann-Image? [Rheinmetall: towards a squeaky-clean image through football?]” Then, in English: “Protecting BVB from sportswashing is our mission. You don’t care about football, you only care about money.”
One wonders why Dortmund’s CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke would risk the certainty of this backlash for a deal which is said to be worth less than €10 million a year to the club. It feels like there is something bigger going on here, some larger effort to condition public opinion involving greater forces than a cynical football club’s desire to make a few euros.
“It shows where we stand,” Germany’s interior minister Robert Habeck remarked of the “unusual” deal. “We know and unfortunately have to admit that we are in a different, more threatening world.”
Watzke’s statement accompanying the announcement was an unapologetic challenge to supporters. “Taking responsibility,” Dortmund’s tweet began, with the CEO adding: “Security and defence are fundamental cornerstones of our democracy. Especially today, when we see every day how freedom must be defended in Europe. We should deal with this new normality.” Rheinmetall is the arsenal of democracy, Watzke seems to be saying: deal with it.
“Taking responsibility” might seem an odd phrase for the club to use until you realise that “taking responsibility in a changing world” is Rheinmetall’s corporate mission statement, as outlined in the company’s new magazine Dimensions. The first issue argues that Germany has to start thinking with “facts instead of feelings” when it comes to national security policy.
As Rheinmetall CFO Dagmar Steinert explains: “Inadequate protection puts you at risk of losing your freedom. As such there is no sense in stigmatising an entire industry that is indispensable as far as security is concerned. Sustainability ends where war begins.”
An opinion piece in Die Welt argued: “The fact is that without an effective defence, values such as democracy, freedom and minority protection could be at stake. And BVB, like other Bundesliga clubs, is explicitly committed to these values... in this respect it would be hypocritical to denounce this sponsorship, of all things.” War, if you think hard about it, is peace.
War is also extremely profitable for investors in companies such as Rheinmetall. The week before Russia invaded Ukraine Rheinmetall shares were trading at €96. A month after the invasion they had risen to €202. On October 6th, 2023, the shares traded at €233. By last week, after nearly seven months of war in Gaza, they had reached €527. With war proliferating around the world and orders pouring in from Nato partners and allies, Steinert predicts Rheinmetall sales will hit €13-14 billion in 2026, with a profit margin of around 15 per cent.
It’s a rare success story in a German economy beset by uncertainties over both energy supplies and the Chinese export market. Why not, then, celebrate this success? And what better way to spread that message to the world than by attaching it to one of the world’s most popular football clubs?
Here is the latest morbid symptom of what the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, calls the “Zeitenwende” – the turning of the times. It must be head-spinning for German football fans, who have recently protested the encroachment of the likes of Red Bull and Qatar Airways into their game, to suddenly be invited to acclaim Germany’s world-leading weapons industry. Rather than disparaging such firms as merchants of death, they must learn to see them as respectable regional employers, export-champions and freedom-enablers.
The game, it hardly needs to be said, is in a really bad place.
