Rarely have we anti-Madrid fans felt more identified with a footballer than last Tuesday with Kim Min-jae, the South Korean central defender of Bayern Munich: you trust yourself, you leave your comfort zone to follow a ghost and when you want to realize it you have Vinicius Jr. beating your goalkeeper, Nacho lifting the European Cup and Florentino Pérez letting himself be embraced by the balconies of half of Madrid. A story repeated too many times to be a coincidence. A modus operandi that leaves us looking like fools from time to time for not knowing how to read the signs, for insisting on error, for not fighting the myth when the myth sleeps, which is almost never. For not accepting, in short, that Madrid is dangerous, reliable and, worst of all, transversal.
Against Madrid everything pales as soon as the chords of the Champions League anthem sound, possibly the biggest mistake of their rivals in the last quarter of a century, since they are the ones who have consented to this kind of martial reminder at the beginning of each match. My father sums it up with a very round phrase for anyone who wants to hear it: “as soon as they get eleven together, they start competing,” he usually says at the first blow of the whistle, at the first slap. As soon as eleven carpenters are brought together, the diagnosis could be completed. Or eleven youth players, which for that matter would be the same. According to my father, I insist, who is also very Barça (because it is one thing to be a brilliant philosopher and another, very different, to apply your own philosophy), the competitive greatness of Madrid in Europe, the differential factor that alters all sporting balances and even financial, has to do with a purely regulatory issue: jumping with eleven registered to the green.
There will be those who point out, not without reason, that there is still one game left to play and that Bayern is an enemy that should not be trusted. Not far from Munich either, although much of its legend has been forged in the warmth of the monks. It could happen that the Germans eliminate Madrid and save us another summer in the shade of the pine trees, avoiding the sand, barely getting our feet wet for fear of being bitten by a spider fish, which is the Madrid animal par excellence. But normal is what usually happens. And in recent years we have become accustomed, in the resistance, to sensing Madrid’s victories long before they occur, a bit like insects and natural disasters. Another fact to support the prediction: Real Madrid has gone four games in a row without winning in the Champions League, its best historical streak.
I would say then, from a distance and from respect, that the challenge for Real Madrid fans this year could be precisely that: winning, but without winning. Winning without it being too noticeable, in short, is a form of humility like any other for whom humility is prohibited by decree. Or by the nature of the monster itself. If not, ask Kim Min-jae, the latest martyr of anti-Madridism, who thought he saw a sparrow and came across Godzilla nestled in his kitchen. It’s not his fault, it’s almost never anyone’s fault, just the usual thing when Madrid brings together eleven footballers, cellists, postmen, cats… And the rest of us look at each other in search of a logical explanation, as if repeating dessert in the glory was a matter of luck or, even more humiliating, purely mechanical.
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