A few weeks ago Aurelién Tchouaméni gave an interview where he recalled the reaction of his Real Madrid team-mates to winning the 2024 Champions League final at Wembley.
“You mentioned people at Madrid are used to winning. All of a sudden we’ve won the Champions League and I’m in the locker room, and I thought,” – and here Tchouaméni looked around with wide eyes and a bewildered shrug – “what’s happening? And that’s when you realise a lot of the guys had already won it three, four, five times.
“I talked to Camavinga and Ferland Mendy, they’d already won it once. They told me nothing could compare to winning the Champions League for the first time. I remember that it was Jude’s first time, and we really celebrated this moment. Most of the guys, although they did celebrate, were already thinking: Okay, we won this year. But we have to win next year, you know?”
It was plain that Tchouaméni himself felt some of his colleagues might have strayed across the thin line separating steely-eyed professionalism from utter joylessness.
We can exclude Toni Kroos from the group that was already saying in the dressingroom “we have to win next year”, since the match at Wembley was his last for Madrid before he retired from club football. At the end of that final he had looked like the happiest man on the pitch.
While Kroos embraced his fellow six-time winner Luka Modric, Jude Bellingham was giving an on-pitch interview in which he spoke about the powerful emotions he was feeling in a curiously emotionless tone. He seemed to be trying to squeeze out the tears that would befit an occasion of such high emotion. He looked like a young man who had just climbed Everest and was trying to process an unexpected feeling of disappointment that it hadn’t been harder.
Madrid’s celebrations in 2024, their second Champions League title in three seasons, were orgiastic compared to what had happened in 2018 in Kyiv, when they won the title for the third year in a row.
That night Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale both announced they were thinking about leaving the club within an hour of full-time. As it turned out they were both beaten to the exit by the coach, Zinedine Zidane, who was so disgusted that he had to spend the immediate aftermath of victory talking about what these divas were going to do next that he resigned five days later.
Ronaldo holds a lot of Champions League records – most appearances (183), most goals (140), most goals in knock-out stages (67), most finals scored in (three) – and it’s possible that over time these could be taken from him. But nobody will ever break his record for “most miserable interview given immediately after winning the Champions League” – set that night in Kyiv in 2018.
The thing was that Ronaldo hadn’t actually scored in the final, but he was not bothered by that at all, not in the slightest bit. “The Champions League should change its name and become the CR7 Champions League,” he said. “I have won for the fifth time and I am the top scorer so I cannot be sad.”
“I cannot be sad”. Maybe if Ronaldo had known on the night that it would be the last time he would win the Champions League he would have tried to sound a bit more excited about it at the time.
Since Madrid have spent the last decade getting so used to victory that they hardly felt it any more, they should thank Arsenal for reintroducing them to the far more commonly felt football emotions of disappointment and humiliation.
It’s not often that you feel sorry for the players of Real Madrid but last week was an exception. The Madrid-industrial complex spent the build-up to the second leg against Arsenal trying to brainwash Mikel Arteta’s team into submission with sheer bluster.
As the side that had it all to lose Arsenal should have been the ones feeling the pressure, but the effect of the “remontada” propaganda was to reverse the pressure back on to Madrid. Unsurprisingly the players proved unable to produce a miracle on demand.
Such a resounding defeat demands a scapegoat, and so Madrid are gearing up to sack the most successful coach in their history.
In an era when many of the coaching greats have been ideologues insisting on the superiority of a particular way of playing, Carlo Ancelotti has built his reputation on flexibility and improvisation. Madrid have been happy to celebrate this when he wins: Ancelotti is the cunning fox who knows many things, running rings around the hedgehogs who believe in one big thing. Unlike the narrow-minded hedgehog, the fox has no need for a fixed tactical plan: he adapts to circumstances as they arise.
But when the fox loses he is accused of failing to be a hedgehog: “Carlo – you fool – you have no plan!”
There might well be a plan by which Madrid’s three star left-wingers, Mbappé, Vinicius Jr and Rodrygo, could be integrated into one cohesive attacking unit – but nobody has thought of it yet. The expectation in Madrid is that Ancelotti will be replaced by Xabi Alonso, whose successful system at Leverkusen doesn’t use wingers at all.
There is a widespread belief that the Real president Florentino Perez meddled disastrously by demanding the signing of Mbappé when he already had a near-identical star in Vini Jr. On Sunday night, during a home game against Athletic Bilbao, the suspended Mbappé appeared on the big screen only to be whistled by the Madrid fans. They blame him for destabilising the team. But as the president’s favourite Mbappé is not going anywhere.
For a club that looked in such good shape less than a year ago the future is suddenly uncertain. Maybe by the time they win their next Champions League enough time will have passed that they will really, really enjoy it.
