Real Madrid dreams of a historic season

Real Madrid lives days of wine and roses. The conquest of the Spanish Super Cup has triggered optimism in a team that leads the League with authority, is still alive in the Copa del Rey and will hopefully face the first leg of the Champions League round of 16 next month against PSG, a rival intimidating but the Whites hope to beat to continue dreaming of what could be a historic season.

It is true that the Spanish Super Cup has a smaller entity with respect to the trophies that can validate a campaign for the Chamartín club. But the victory in the final against Athletic serves to endorse the work carried out to date by a squad that has won 76.6% so far this season, a record notably higher than the 59.6% of games settled with success with which he completed the previous season, in which he fought until the end for the League and the Champions League but ended up going blank.

To find a similar percentage of wins at Real Madrid, you have to go back to the 2016-17 campaign, when the block that Zinedine Zidane led at the time secured a historic League-Champions double underpinned by a 73.3% win rate in the season. That course serves as a reference for the group now supervised by Carlo Ancelotti, the main architect of the trajectory that has allowed Real Madrid to break the eighteen-month drought without titles that it had accumulated since winning the 2019-20 League in unprecedented conditions.

With the Spanish Super Cup, the Italian coach added his fifth trophy with Real Madrid, since in his first stage in the Spanish capital he secured the Champions League, the European Super Cup, the Club World Cup and the Copa del Rey. Only the League resists him, a championship with which he hopes to close the circle. If successful, he would become the first coach to conquer the five major European football leagues, given that he already triumphed in Italy with Milan (2003-04), in England with Chelsea (2009-10), in France with PSG. (2012-13) and in Germany with Bayern Munich (2016-17 and 2017-18).

Ancelotti mouth cover

Carletto is criticized for his lack of inclination towards rotations, invoking the specter of what happened in his previous stay on the Real Madrid bench, when a team that was flying to the Club World Cup fell from January and left empty in a course that culminated in his dismissal. But the experienced coach from Reggiolo has learned the lesson well and for the moment he has been able to weather the few potholes that the road has thrown at him.

His fascination with counterattack, theoretical anathema for big teams, is also ugly. But they forget that Real Madrid, unlike Barça, has never fallen prey to style because what matters in Chamartín is only winning, whether civil or criminal. And Ancelotti knows how to adapt his systems to the footballers he has at his disposal because he has always fled from fundamentalism.

The dressing room reveres him, perhaps the most important element in governing a team full of stars that Ancelotti has known how to promote since his return. There is the growth of Vinicius as the main exponent of the coach’s ability to play the right key with players he manages with a lot of left hand.

It should be remembered that Real Madrid has had to suffer the onslaught of injuries and the coronavirus, which have not, however, made a dent in the performance of a squad in which the usual black spots continue to be placed: the absentee Bale, the apathetic Isco or Hazard or the missing Jovic. On the contrary, the extraordinary adaptation of Alaba stands out, the great moment of confidence that Courtois is going through, the self-confidence and effectiveness of Vinicius, the punch of Benzema and, above all, the validity of a midfield Legendary who dictates the times at will.

All of them elements that Ancelotti has been able to combine to configure what Florentino Pérez considers “the beginning of a new era”. The president of Real Madrid took his chest in Riyadh from the present, while he continues to outline a future that goes through the arrival of Kylian Mbappé and perhaps Erling Haaland. Two stars who would offer the leap in quality necessary to definitively bring to a close that long journey through the desert that began with the departure of Cristiano Ronaldo. There is also a lack of more wardrobe, but there is no doubt at this point that Ancelotti’s return was a success. This is how they understand it in the ‘white house’, where ambition is maximum.