The fight between Tchouameni and Valverde gives new hope to the failed controversy of the guard of honor: it is known that Madrid should not do it for Barcelona at Camp Nou, but the same should be done by Barcelona for Madrid at the Clínic door. It would be the Berlanguian finishing touch, everyone in shorts applauding the arrival of stretchers, for a year that ended at Madrid exploding in the worst way, disciplinarily, the only way Real cannot end or start, which has to do with conduct, image, and values that, as a last favor after losing everything, Álvaro Arbeloa and Florentino Pérez begged the squad in the locker room: to end it with dignity. Not even that.
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That two players argue loudly and almost come to blows on a training day, and end up pushing each other the next day, makes no more sense than what Madrid itself wants to give it. That doesn’t even happen in a fourth-grade ESO class. Two kids confronting and threatening each other in the classroom, and the next day fighting in the same classroom? Well, there is Real Madrid, the most famous club in the world, asking you to hold their drink.
There is no better indicator of the chaos now ravaging the locker room. At Madrid, instead of throwing water on the fires, they throw gasoline. One might not control two players fighting in the heat of the moment (they play on the edge, there is contact and kicks), but after such a serious warning as the previous day’s? Beyond where Arbeloa was or what he did, who is known for not messing around and has punished indiscipline without batting an eye, where were the players, the famous Madrid players, the locker room leaders who boasted for so many years that they ruled the club along with the president, and the coach had to be a nice guy? Is there no one in that squad, in that group of footballers, with the authority of a Ramos, a Hierro, a Raúl, a Modric, someone who at the slightest slight or suspicion of a fight sends the fighters or tattletales home, or marks them, or has a talk with them?
Let’s not lose sight, blinded by degrading violence, that the locker room is a sieve: everything is told, everything spreads, and not always facts but versions of facts. A locker room should be an Egyptian tomb: the first one who drills it risks the mummies. In such hermetic worlds, the little that is told is not verified nor is there a way to do so. Madrid is now a club where traditional media orbit trying to scrape something and 6,931 YouTubers and Twitter users, who claim to have sources in the board, in the squad, and in the usual bars. And they do.
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It is very serious that two guys with bodies that could kill anyone do not control their impulses; it’s ridiculous that one even comes out injured from the locker room. And beneath that seriousness, which is the utmost seriousness, floats the feeble commitment of players who betray the trust of their teammates, their own, and the institution’s, moving damaged goods to the media, undrinkable waters, news with the intention to destroy or poison, childishness, cheap strategies.
The power of friendship, it was said in 2024 of the group (with Tchouameni and Valverde) that, without Cristiano and in Ancelotti’s return, managed to win two more Champions. Of that power of friendship, only the power and ambition to achieve it in the locker room above the coach and anyone else remain. With the tensions that generates. And the defeats.
