By signing so many players who came to the club at a loss of money, Barça went to ruin. I say this in case anyone needs a little emotional push to overcome the global crisis unleashed by the signing of Kylian Mbappé just a few hours after Real Madrid was proclaimed, once again, European champion. “Madrid signs the atomic bomb,” wrote our colleague Manuel Jabois shortly after the news was confirmed, a text in which he also mentioned that the French striker arrives in the capital of Spain losing a lot of money: that’s what non-Madrid fans should hold on to.
It is an old love story of the professional athlete who puts dreams before money, especially when he has already earned enough to go to sleep and start dreaming. I don’t know if this is exactly the case with Mbappé, whose entourage leaked at the beginning of the year some very specific minimum amounts to sit down and talk to any club interested in an attacker of mass destruction: 120 million euros as a transfer bonus and a minimum of 50 million as salary, whether gross or net is an almost metaphysical question, it is better not to go into it. Nor should we care more than necessary how much Madrid pays or has stopped paying the Frenchman, they will know.
The only thing that seems demonstrable is the state of perpetual happiness in which the internationalmadridismo of the last decade. It is an incontestable fact that can be guessed at first glance; the sense of smell and intelligence of Sherlock Holmes is not needed either. In Barcelona, for example, we have long ago given up that same happiness. Or a similar one, who am I to compare? Maybe we don’t know how to do it. Or it could simply be that we can no longer get used to it, to happiness, or to the proportional part that corresponds to us after having manipulated it to infinity in the years of Guardiola, Messi, Cruyff, Unicef, Manel’s concerts, the Live life of Coldplay, the rollers and the endless drip of La Masia, where everyone who showed their head seemed to us xaviniesta.
And it is not that we voluntarily renounce it, as Manuel Jabois also said in a tweet back in 2012 (Jabois always says everything first, like Churchill, or Chesterton), but the total and sincere acceptance that it is no longer for us. , that it does not correspond to us. We simply do not know how to be happy, without further ado, as we demonstrated by exhausting the patience of Guardiola – a saint – or dispatching Messi’s entire family in installments so as not to have to dispatch him directly. They are just details, simple and small gestures, but those that count for a lot and explain almost everything.
Blessed are the non-Madridistas, for theirs will be the kingdom of heaven: this could be the perfect summary of the moment. Promises are almost never much more than that, promises, unless you introduce Florentino Pérez into the equation. Then everything becomes an obsession and there is nothing more dangerous in life, or in football, than a smart man with an obsession. “They are too good and there are too many of them, in general,” we tell ourselves in the dark, in our room, to convince ourselves that the feat is possible, that they can be defeated. Or simply wait for them to devour each other, that is our best asset right now: that collective ambition takes everything ahead, like in Falcon Crest. Not in vain do they seem to have signed Lorenzo Lamas.
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