When you think about it, it's a bit strange that the best team in the world added the best player in the world, thereby forming a potentially era-defining superteam, and yet it doesn't seem like the union between Real Madrid and Kylian Mbappé has been received as the monumental occasion it truly is.
Part of it comes from the collective exhaustion with the endless will-they-or-won't-they dynamic between player and club. Watching the two make goo-goo eyes at each other from across the Pyrenees for four years straight bled the courtship of all its titillation, even now that they're finally fucking. The other part is probably a response to the infinitely impressive but still somewhat dulling nature of Madrid's success. So you're telling me the reigning Champions League champions, winners of six of the last 11 European Cups, are the favorites to win the Champions League again?
Still, it's always good to resist the inuring effects of greatness, and the new-look Blancos certainly have the potential to become something you won't want to miss. Putting Mbappé, Vinícius, and Jude Bellingham all out on the pitch together threatens to result in soccer of the most rarified sort, the kind that comes to represent an entire epoch by synecdoche. Though in these early days of the BMV (I'm sure all of us Americans would've preferred MVB or KJV, but alas, we're stuck with an acronym that for us conjures memories of long lines and registration stickers), what's been most interesting is how much of a struggle it's been to show even flashes of the greatness that seems destined to come. If the results of Real's start to the season stand for anything, it's the idea that even the mightiest of giants aren't born loping through the countryside terrorizing villagers, and instead have to learn it all from scratch.
Through the first six matches of the new season, Madrid has four wins, two draws, and zero impressive performances. The team struggles to defend and, more surprisingly, to attack. More than Mbappé's presence, the most noticeable difference between this team and last year's is Toni Kroos's absence. Kroos was the one who told everyone where to go, how to play, when to walk, and when to run. Without Kroos, and with no similar pace-setter on the roster, the new Real has emerged as an erratic group that either can't get going or, once it does get going, can only go at top speed, the disparate parts flying fast, yes, but without the order and coordination needed to make it most effective. The team is like a baby desperately trying to run when it hasn't even yet learned how to walk.
Tuesday brought the return of the Champions League to Madrid, in the form of the surprising Bundesliga upstarts of Stuttgart. As a club that defines itself by what happens in continental competition, this was in some respects the true start of the season for Real. The Blancos would've hoped to kick their title defense off with the kind of firework show expected of the BMV. Instead, it was more of the same: disjointed play, isolated players and lines, long stretches of being dominated by the opponent, defensive frailty, vertiginous attacking that weakened both teams from dizziness, and, in spite of it all, a handful of moments of inspiration that delivered victory.
The 3-1 scoreline from Tuesday's match was indicative of the two teams but not of the match itself. Real's players are much, much better than Stuttgart's, so it only follows that the team with the good guys would beat the other one by a couple of goals. But as has been the case in basically all of Real's matches this season, it was far more difficult for that glaring talent difference to make itself felt than it should've been. Without Kroos, Real's build-up play is bad, and its possessions aimless. Stuttgart took advantage of this, pressing the home team relentlessly in the first half, which starved Madrid's fearsome attackers of the ball and gave Stuttgart plenty of chances to mount attacks on Thibaut Courtois's goal. After half an hour of one-sided play that favored the Germans, Bellingham stepped up to try to finally bridge the gaps between the team's two disconnected units, the defense and midfield on one side and the forwards on the other. Once Bellingham started appearing behind Stuttgart's press, giving his fellow midfielders an intermediary passing option that could then get the ball to the forwards in better conditions, Real found its way into the match.
Still, "finding its way" into an equal match against Stuttgart, making its first Champions League appearance in 15 years, hardly counts as a triumph for a team of Real Madrid's quality and ambitions. The last hour of the match was a lot of fun for the neutral—a real back-and-forth affair with lots of chances on both ends—but had to be worrying for the Madridistas. The Blancos were at no point able to exert any kind of control on the proceedings. Again, it all goes back to Kroos. Along with masterminding Madrid's build-ups, Kroos was the one who dictated whether the team should attack quickly or slow things down, bringing the team together and moving it up the pitch as one. Without Kroos, and with the team's hierarchy slanted in favor of the BMV, the team plays at the pace of three players who only know acceleration. Every forward run compels a launched pass to meet it, leaving no room for the discretion Kroos brought that made it all tick.
The effects echo upon each other. Real goes forward too fast to connect the attacker with his teammates, so the isolated attacks are easier to cut out. Upon turning the ball over, Real has a hard time transitioning to defense, since the players are nowhere near each other and can't muster much pressure on the ball. Unable to cut off the routes to its own penalty box, the Real players have to go sprinting backwards, where they are often undermanned (none of the three forwards have much interest in defending, and Bellingham is often late to return to his position after getting so far forward on the other end). When Real does get the defensive stop, it then lacks a sound way to progress the ball back up the pitch without an organizing passer like Kroos. Eventually someone just hits a long pass forward onto a Vinícius or Mbappé run, and the cycle starts all over again.
Of course, bombing up the pitch with forwards like these is hardly an awful gameplan. Two of Madrid's three goals against Stuttgart came that way, and if anyone's equipped to win shootouts, it's the team with Mbappé, Vinícius, Bellingham, Rodrygo, and Endrick. However, it can't be denied that even with wins like the Stuttgart one, Real's whole has routinely been less than the sum of its parts. And though the club's outrageous six-in-11 Champions League run featured otherworldly performances from legendary forwards like Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema, and most recently Vinícius, the moment-mastering style of play that won all those trophies originated from Kroos's midfield, not Ronaldo's/Benzema's/Vinícius's forward lines.
When Kroos left and Mbappé came, Madrid was always going to need to discover a new way of playing. Likewise, the search for this new way was always going to take time. But there's no reason to think the Blancos won't eventually find a new style that produces play every bit as majestic as the assembled talent would imply. Let's not forget that it took fully half a season for Lionel Messi, Neymar, and Luis Suárez to really click at Barcelona, after which point they became a generation's benchmark for attacking power. Though we also shouldn't forget that the MSN only won one Champions League together before Neymar's search for more of the spotlight broke them up, and the Neymar, Messi, Mbappé trio never hit its stride at PSG. In other words, nothing is guaranteed.
Nevertheless, time is on Real Madrid's side, as is maybe history's greatest ever manager when it comes to chiseling a unique, balanced, beautiful team out of expensive but lumpy hunks of marble. Tuesday's was only Bellingham's second match of the season. As the one midfielder and the only true two-way player of the new big three, he will be the key to whatever it is Madrid will become if it is to become something great. Likewise, Tuesday was Endrick's first ever Champions League match. The 18-year-old marked the occasion with a goal that displayed the thunderous, precise, hair-trigger shooting and the boundless confidence (shrugging off a wide-open Vini and a wide-open Mbappé to instead have a rip himself from 35 yards out! Who does that!) that makes him such a special prospect. Endrick entering the starting lineup in place of Rodrygo could be what provides better order to the front line, giving it the focal presence both Mbappé and Vinícius prefer to play off of.
Bellingham back in the lineup, Endrick fighting for a spot there, Éder Militão and Eduardo Camavinga and David Alaba getting healthy, Aurélien Tchouaméni and Fede Valverde learning how to assume more of Kroos's missing role, figuring out how to best dose Luka Modric—these are all things that could and should help Madrid relearn how to walk and then how to run. And eventually, hopefully, how to fly.
