How dysfunctional is a football club which wins by eight goals – their biggest margin of victory for more than half a century – yet still leave a significant number of supporters distinctly less than impressed?
– INSTAGRAM: Most followed players on social media tool
That was the bizarre scenario at Real Madrid on Sunday, when one of the craziest games you could ever see resulted in the hosts suffering repeated barracking from their own supporters despite thrashing Rayo Vallecano 10-2.
Reading the Spanish press over the last few days without any prior knowledge of Sunday’s result, you would even have assumed that Madrid had lost that game at the Bernabeu, never mind won it by eight.
Since then, all we’ve heard is how captain Sergio Ramos still misses former manager Carlo Ancelotti, Cristiano Ronaldo is fed up with the fans, president Florentino Perez is considering reappointing Jose Mourinho, and James Rodriguez wants to join Manchester United.
All of that…after winning 10-2? Yes, that’s how weird this season at Real Madrid is becoming.
Rafael Benitez’s job legitimately under threat despite his team having scored 16 goals and counting in the last three matches
— Iain Strachan (@IainStrachan) December 20, 2015
The brooding atmosphere of dissatisfaction has been simmering for a long time now, with repeated signs that it is ready to boil over. And that has happened because although Madrid fans have a well-earned reputation for being extremely demanding, they are not stupid.
Supporters at the Bernabeu expect their team to be the best. They expect to win and they also expect to play with style, with entertainment and with more than a touch of arrogance. But they have also seen many teams and players over the years who have lived up to those lofty standards, and they can see the club is currently heading in the wrong direction.
Madridistas can see that Gareth Bale is guaranteed a place in the starting XI despite never proving he is good enough to have earned that protected status; they can see that Ronaldo, for all his goalscoring magnificence, has a tendency to play for himself rather than the team; they can see that manager Rafael Benitez’s tactics are unclear and unconvincing.
And most of all, they can see that Perez does not know how to run a football team, evidenced by the fact they have won just one league title in the last seven campaigns despite an enormous annual outlay in the transfer market each and every season.
Perez is a successful businessman but he needs to accept his limitations. He thinks that, as well as running the club, he can also run the team – without realising there is an enormous distinction between the two.
He thinks he can buy success by recruiting and selling glamorous players and hiring and firing a succession of managers, and he has failed to learn the many lessons that his approach just does not work.
Real Madrid fans are starting to realise this, in droves, and they have increasingly had enough – even when their team wins by eight goals.
