Wednesday night, Álvaro Morata scored Juventus' equalizing goal in the Bernabeu to send the Old Lady of Turin through to the Champions League final at the expense of Real Madrid. Morata is a child of the Madrid cantera, a youth product who was sold off to Juventus last summer. But he is also the latest entrant in one of the great ongoing stories of modern football: the Tragedy of Real Madrid, also known as the Spanish Play.
How Real Madrid ensured their own downfall, again
The strange transfer decisions of Real Madrid came back to haunt them in the Champions League, and it wasn’t the first time.
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By his own account, Morata's move from Spain to Italy wasn't solely motivated by a search for more playing time. Rather, it was a sense that he was being benched without good reason and being overlooked despite playing well. Morata himself has claimed that by the time he left, his relationship with Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti had completely broken down, though one does wonder if that's enough reason in itself to leave the Bernabéu. After all, there's usually another coach along shortly.
Perhaps Morata isn't good enough (yet) to have earned a starting place ahead of Karim Benzema, and he certainly doesn't have the right initials to be part of the BBC. Nor would his presence in the squad have led to the sudden return to fitness of Luka Modric, the reinvigoration and de-mardification of Cristiano Ronaldo, or the welcome return of precision to Gareth Bale's finishing, all of which played some part in Wednesday's result.
However, it's hard to argue that he wouldn't be a better option at first change than Javier Hernández, even if the Mexican has in recent weeks finally remembered which boot goes on which foot. And he certainly would have represented more sensible business: with him gone they had to take a Manchester United reject late in the last window and will likely need to be shopping again this summer. Rumours suggest that there's a buy-back clause in Morata's contract; if so, that's one expensive finishing school. Save on the wages; cost yourself the final.
Here we should probably note that Juventus are making something of a policy of salvaging other clubs' castoffs to great effect. As well as Morata, last night's team included Andrea Pirlo, unwanted by AC Milan, as well as Carlos Tevez, Patrice Evra and Paul Pogba, all of whom might still have been some use back in Manchester. So, well done, Juventus.
But we’re talking about Real Madrid, and this is just what they do. Good players, occasionally even great players, are first sidelined and then discarded for reasons that don’t seem to have much to do with football. This one’s too ugly, that one’s too boring. He’s too unfashionable, and he’s too defensive. Him? Too obviously the favored purchase of a previous regime. And every now and then, they come back to mock the hand that spurned them.
So it was in 2010, when the Champions League final went to the Bernabéu but Real Madrid didn’t. Still chasing la decima, and with a new class of super-galácticos — Ronaldo, Benzema, Kaká, Xabi Alonso — imported at tremendous cost, they were eliminated in the round of 16 by Lyon, then had to watch two sides built around players sold on from Madrid that summer contested the final in their own backyard. In the end, Wesley Sneijder’s Internazionale (who also featured Esteban Cambiasso, an earlier Madrid castoff) beat Arjen Robben’s Bayern Munich.
Even more directly, so it was in 2004, when Fernando Morientes — for years one half, with Raúl, of one of the best strike partnerships in Europe — found himself bounced out on loan to Monaco after the arrival of (the Brazilian) Ronaldo. He took his revenge against the club that were still paying three-fifths of his wages, scoring once in each leg of the quarterfinals to knock the original galácticos out.
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More from our team site
This isn't to say that the policy doesn't work, for a couple of given meanings of 'work'. Since they sold Claude Makélélé to Chelsea in 2003 — perhaps the most emblematic of the headscratching transfer moments, even though he never actually got to extract any on-pitch revenge — Real have won three Spanish titles, two cups and last season's Champions League, and even if it could be argued that a club of their size and standing should have won more, that's still not too bad. And we can be fairly sure that Madrid have leveraged all these glamorous replacements players into racks and racks of shirt sales, grotesquely swollen sponsorship deals and all the other ancillary measures of success that define the modern superclub.
What it is, though, is properly tragic: a great entity humbled by their own vaulting ambition, the need to have not just the best but the shiniest; the newest and the most glittering. A football club that’s half-magpie, half-Macbeth, undone by those that were from the squad untimely ripped. It’s happened before; it will happen again. Mesut Özil and Ángel di María are out there waiting. And perhaps the whistles will drive Gareth Bale into somebody else’s grateful arms.
Sometimes they get away with it; sometimes, like last night, they don’t. That said, football results differ from tragedies in one important regard. Macbeth ended with blood everywhere and Scotland in quite a mess. When Real Madrid end up the unwitting architects of their downfall, it’s mostly just very, very funny.
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