Recently, a Madrid friend took it, in my opinion too theatrically for us to take it seriously, with Toni Kroos. He blamed him for the goals conceded, he demanded explanations from Ancelotti when he saw him starting, he ran to the TV to push Kroos’s ass to get him ahead of the team, he ordered him where to direct the appropriate passes. I watched the show with nostalgia. After all, that is the end of all legends, from Di Stéfano to Zidane: that a fan twenty kilos heavier than you and who has never seen a ball explains to you how to play football. At some point during the game, Kroos, as he usually did, opened a gas can with a click of his boots, and Madrid took the lead once, two or three times on the scoreboard, as many times as Kroos wanted. And after the celebrations we looked at our friend, who was smiling happily in his chair: “Do you see how we have to encourage him?”
None of us fans know more about football than Kroos, but we do know much more about decadence than him. At 17, many of us were thinking about something for our lives that never came, and at that age he began his professional career in elite soccer. His withdrawal, however, makes us suspect that he knows his body too well and the fans too well. to think that I would emerge unscathed from a few more years of career. “You have to leave when they can still miss you,” said Xabi Alonso from Munich, another one who left competing in a major European team. Kroos is a player of rare and delicious integrity. He promised himself that at some point he would leave at the top and he has decided to do so on the verge of a Champions League final. He went to Saudi Arabia to earn the whistles with which the dignity of a footballer is rewarded. He has won all the titles, he has lost all but one (club world champion), and he has continued to search on the field for an ancient excellence that links him to the greatest midfielders in history.
His relationship with the game is proportional to his relationship with spaces and the ball. The controls and hitting are exactly the controls and hitting with which Madrid has been moving for ten years. It is a poisonous rhythm, like the stale air that sneaks into the room and everyone breathes without knowing that they are dying; Madrid suffocates on Kroos’s orders, and sometimes the German himself also kills with his hands, like in Munich, when he broke down two German defense lines by moving his fingers. “My idea of football, the basis of my game, is that I am only good when I play for the team. That’s my quality. “If I do something on my own, I’m not that good,” he told EL PAÍS a year ago. He then remembered that he continues learning in the field, that there is no moment in which his curiosity to be better rests.
Kroos has been an impressive beacon in the history of the game and the beauty of Real Madrid. He has dressed up impossible victories by making entire stadiums dance with changes of rhythm in such a way that instead of a football field it seemed like Wimbledon, and he has stopped collapses by monopolizing the ball and reorganizing the mood. He is one of those few football theorists who do better with practice than with lessons. Madrid owes him an aesthetic and a distinguished way of being on the field, the overwhelming and luxurious way with which one always remains in the memory: winning without having to say “I’m sorry.”
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