Hyperventilated, disturbed and thugs

Real Madrid's good performance in the second half of this Saturday's Cup final cannot, should not, cover up, the club's lamentable image before and several players later. It cannot be that an entity that boasts of lordship, honor, and greatness has become a madhouse with symptoms of paranoia. Everyone is after them: UEFA, FIFA, the referees, Tebas, Louzán, the media, and even the Bernabéu residents. It's a deranged, hypersensitive, and often hooligan Madrid that sees ghosts everywhere and provokes embarrassment, not to say shame.

Florentino Pérez's anti-establishment campaign against the Universe is the mother of all paradoxes, being as he is the System with a capital S, but it is dragging the club down its delusional drift, and reflection and self-criticism are beginning to be urgently needed. The act of not attending official events beforehand and spreading the word among sympathetic journalists that even the final was in danger was shameful, even though the referees chose the most inopportune time and place to express their legitimate complaints about the harassment campaign they are suffering from the official television channel. And the behavior of some footballers is the fruit and result of that toxic and hyperventilated environment that the president, and no one else but him, is causing, exerting, and tolerating.

It would be advisable, for example, that Antonio Rüdiger put himself in the hands of professionals to treat his obvious problems managing frustration and learn to have the necessary tools to control his anger. Up to four people, four, had to restrain him from going after Burgos Bengoetxea after throwing an object at him from the touchline. Beyond a sanction that I trust will be exemplary, Madrid cannot tolerate something like this. Jude Bellingham looked like a gentleman until it landed in Madrid and became a hooligan, and captain Dani Carvajal remains so, despite being in civilian clothes, and it cannot go unnoticed, nor should it go unnoticed, that he threatens Saka or insults the referee from the stands.

There is also honor in defeat, no matter how much it hurts. In life and in football, it is more common to lose than to win, and I have no doubt that Real Madrid will win again, but knowing how to behave is a lesson still pending.