As in their most memorable matches, those that have remained in memory forever, Madrid exploded the longest and biggest time bomb on the football planet almost in stoppage time this Monday at 7:28 p.m. It was not in 2021 or 2022, frustrating summers for Madrid, it was not in 2017 either, when Mbappé was playing for Monaco and chose Paris. It was in 2024 and the agonizing wait of months and years of Real Madrid fans for the Frenchman, a wait that had gone through all possible moods (joy, euphoria, disappointment, anger, anger, expectation), became at that time, two days after winning the 15th Champions League, in an absolute outpouring of happiness: the feeling that Mbappé, a declared Real Madrid fan but a Frenchman from Bondy, and a player for PSG for the last seven years, had arrived home. These years Real have done well even when things have gone wrong.
“We have done for this boy what we have not done for anyone. And not because we needed it, because we have players up front and two world stars (Vinicius and Rodrygo) developing, but because it is different. It gave us something different. Mbappé is a hand grenade in the backpack. The game is not unstuck, are we playing badly? We have a grenade in the field. We have done everything we had to do. And we have lost,” a Real Madrid manager revealed two years ago hours after Mbappé wrote to Florentino Pérez to tell him that, contrary to what was verbally agreed, he was staying in Paris. Football, a territory of childhood passions, is subject to emotional ups and downs like this. But that refusal occurred on the eve of a Champions League final in Paris. That European Cup was lifted, and another one has just been lifted in London two years later. Vinicius and Rodrygo are already world stars: there is nothing to cook. A beast comes from Brazil, Endrick. And Jude Bellingham has emerged. Mbappé no longer arrives to save the desert crossing as a result of Cristiano Ronaldo’s departure, as was previously attempted; Mbappé arrives, and that adds more pressure, so that things remain the same.
“Football is a complex thing and you quickly forget both the positive and negative experiences. You have to always be adapting and reinventing yourself,” Mbappé told GQ magazine a few months ago. Real Madrid, which got its first look at Mbappé when the boy was surprising in France at the age of 13, has been trying to sign the French striker since 2017. It has been a seven-year impossible love story with two notorious sit-ins. And, as happens with platonic loves full of denials, when it is least needed, when you least think about it, when there are others who have made you forget it a little, it shows up at the door of the house. Losing (a lot) of money and promising absolute integration into a squad so well-oiled that they throw the Ballon d’Or at each other. He is such a huge striker, so overwhelming, with such overwhelming conditions, that his place is not in dispute: more than a hand grenade, he is an atomic bomb. He prejudges, yes, what his arrival may cause in the locker room, a prejudice that is too reckless considering that he is a world star with years of experience and expensive advice; In any case, even that plays in favor of the delay with which Mbappé arrives in Madrid: he is not that young, and he arrives at a club that does not need him to win everything. He needs it because he has always needed the best players in the world, and because the show must just go on and on and on at the new Santiago Bernabéu.
There is no respite in Madrid, where titles are demanded on the same day they are celebrated (see Florentino Pérez demanding the 16th and Ancelotti sighing: “What pressure”). Nor have the galacticos returned, the plethora of stars from Pérez’s first term in Madrid with whom he wanted to build a (failed) dynasty that would last for years. The years have already been underway since 2014 with occasional survivors and what is coming now is the hunger of others, also of Mbappé, who has won everything except what he dreamed of as a child: the European Cup. The marriage announced this Monday promises wild alliances on the field with forwards and midfielders who discover themselves more compatible with each match. Off the field, the alliance is an iron hammer in the market of passions, shirts and money: the union of the Mbappé and Real Madrid brands, so many times imagined, so many times cherished, is now a reality. And it promises what Madrid usually gives in modern bidding with clubs with unlimited money, what Jorge Valdano said: a story to tell, a glory to continue building.
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