Narrative FC : 1 May 2025

Narrative Edition of The Daily Merengue

The Daily Merengue is a place where you can feel free to d all things football. Do not be alarmed by the overt RMCF bias. It’s in the name! Shoutout to the mods who do a fantastic job, Valyrian Steel, Felipejack, Juninho, NeRObutBlanco and yours truly, Kung_Fu_Zizou

Real Madrid always seem to look outside for solutions until they have no choice but to look within. This is a club that insists they always have the best of everything and yet the very first bump on the road and that narrative evaporates. We suddenly need what everyone else has and we need all of it. The small margins by which we’ve lost titles or games suddenly get explained away by the fact that there’s a player out there playing for the wrong team this season and if we fix that next season we will win everything. We never win everything anyway.

Vallejo is back and our worries about injuries have completely vanished.

The Rodrygo Affair

The media has latched on to this again. It is honestly something they repeat every summer. This time it just might take. Unfortunately for Rodrygo, Tchouaméni was player of the month so Marca can’t really put him in the shop window at the moment. Rodrygo will have to ride it out.

Marca knows Rodrygo’s inner most feelings and thanks to them so do we. The Brazilian winger has come in for scathing criticism as one would expect when you’re part of a bad team. It’s not obvious how he’s been ignored or excluded. When the complaints are about forwards not tracking back, he’s not highlighted as a problem. If anything he’s shown as the exception. Then when we don’t score and the front 3 are blamed, he will be defended by, “You can’t expect him to be everywhere..”. There’s really not much to talk about when players are underperforming in an underperforming team.

Here goes.. Real Madrid need to make some signings this summer because winning nothing sucks and being humiliated by Barcelona and Arsenal really sucks.. Something something.. Real Madrid will have to sell in order to buy. This is where Rodrygo comes in. Will he stay where he doesn’t belong or do the Noble thing and leave the club as an absolute gesture of good will. That’s where this narrative is headed.

GK Non-Issue Issue

Andrey Lunin has been a fantastic number 2. There are many quick to criticise him for any mistake.. “That’s why he can’t be the number 1..”. Realistically, you don’t want to have two number 1s. It’s a waste. GKs are hardly ever rotated and they are hardly ever injured, nor do they get as fatigued as the outfield players. We should be happy with Lunin and yet..

Lunin is being pressured to remain comfy in that number 2 role otherwise the club will sign Joan Garcia who many clubs want as their number 1. They will sign the GK with the highest number of saves in La Liga only 23 years old to sit on the bench on matchdays.

The often confounding nature of these narratives is how incoherent they are when they come into contact with any tangible reality.

The narrative seeks to make Lunin look surplus to requirements and that he’s actually occupying a spot that the club should be looking to improve.

We do not have GK issues. None. Lunin has been great when called upon and Courtois is now injury prone. We have a good balance. If we sign Joan Garcia for the future, he should only arrive when we’re ready to let Courtois leave.

Arda Guler and the Sunday League Ballers

Real Madrid have brilliant midfielders. I mean they’re not brilliant because they play for Real Madrid, they play for Real Madrid because they are brilliant.

In order to explain away a poor season. We pretend that everything went wrong in April. Not in August. Not in November. Not in January but in April. The poor form of the team throughout the season and the manager’s inability to adapt to the reality around him is all ignored. The problem is we don’t have elite technical midfielders.

Everyone else does. Arsenal, PSG, Barcelona, Inter Milan etc. But not Real Madrid. Arda Guler is not technically gifted. He’s certainly not elite. If he was, we would be top of the league. Say less about Jude Bellingham. Oh.. Those two Frenchmen masquerading as midfielders. The Uruguayan road runner Fede Valverde. Ceballos at the highest level of his career.. Modric with his start-padding.

“The quality he has..” Not the potential quality. Those are Carlo’s words. I wonder what another team would do with a player who has the exact quality they need to improve the way they play?!

No.. What Real Madrid need is an elite, technical midfielder. A Florian Wirtz? No. Vitinha. Nah.. Here’s one, Zubimendi. I’ll go one better Enzo Fernandez, the World Cup winner.

The Reality

Carlo Ancelotti did not have to coach his team to look for Toni Kroos during build-up. He didn’t have to coach his attackers to look for Benzema. In build-up everyone knew the ball was safe with Kroos and in the final 3rd, Karim would keep the ball safe.

Both players left in subsequent seasons. After Karim left, Jude Bellingham became that focal point and we just about got away with it.

Then Kroos left and Kylian Mbappe arrived. Now there’s no one in the defensive third to bring the ball out and no one in the attacking 3rd to keep the ball like Karim used to.

Carlo went for the laziest solution.. Hoof it forward to the pacey forwards.

The long and short of it.. Real Madrid have been taking part in football tournaments but played very little football. It’s not for a lack of creative players or technical players, or talent of any kind.. They’ve not played ball this season and no amount of Zubimendi, Wirtz and Enzo Fernandez can fix that.

We have fullbacks who cannot play out of pressure on their own but we’re not unique! Hardly any team has such players, the manager sets them up to find these avenues. Instead our manager took the laziest way out. He refused to coach the team to play ball for the entire season.

The narratives will swirl around all summer most of it to distract from the simple fact that Real Madrid had a poor season and it had nothing to do with the level of players in the squad. The squad is not perfect and can always improve. Nobody’s squad is perfect. It tends to be one of the more compelling reasons for clubs to hire a manager.

One More For Good Measure

The Daily Poll

Poll 1

Poll 2