On the way out of the Emirates Stadium, someone asked Kylian Mbappé whether Real Madrid could still do this. “Course we can,” he replied, three words and then he was gone. In front of him, Vinícius Júnior left in silence. Rodrygo passed by unnoticed again. Luka Modric didn’t talk, nor did Fede Valverde. Lucas Vázquez and Raúl Asencio did, then Thibaut Courtois and Jude Bellingham.
“We weren’t good,” Vázquez said. Courtois said: “We forgot to play well.” Asencio said: “It’s not what we expected,” but it wasn’t unexpected either, which is why it was the description Bellingham didn’t use which said it best.
Asked whether he was shocked, Bellingham said: “I don’t know if ‘shocked’ is the right word.”
No one who has watched them all year could have truly been shocked by this, except that they’re Real Madrid, stupid, and somehow Real Madrid always seem to find a way. “There is nothing we can draw from external excuses or anything like that; we have to look at ourselves,” Bellingham said. “These are similar sets of themes to when we have dropped points all season. It’s happened again tonight on a larger scale.”
Courtois wondered whether he might have put an extra man in the wall, but that was such a tiny failing alongside those of the team that it felt slightly absurd. By the end of the 3-0 defeat, it wasn’t even that Madrid were bad exactly, a catalogue of identifiable errors, a long list of mistakes and men to blame, although there are always some of those; it was more that they just, well, weren’t. The goals had been superb and Bellingham spoke of how well Arsenal had played, which they had, but Madrid had been, well, nothing really: a void, 11 empty grey shirts.
They had fallen away mentally and physically after going behind, Ancelotti said, and if everyone could agree with that it was harder to agree with his claim that for an hour they had played well. Until the goals, there had been a familiar passivity; after the first of them, there was no reaction, no resistance, no anything. Instead of being shaken into action, they were overwhelmed. “We were nowhere near it, that’s the fact: they could have had way more, we’re lucky to get away with three,” Bellingham said.
Get away with it is a recurring theme, and they still could, but Madrid looked and ended up like what they are: the 11th team in the league phase playing the third.
That league finish flattered them, too: Lille beat them, Stuttgart, Liverpool and Milan outplayed them. They opened the European season with a comeback against Dortmund and would end up needing so many of them that it came to irritate fans as much as it excited them. They got to the quarter-finals with a 1-0 defeat at Atlético Madrid that would have put them out in the days of the away-goals rule but saw them through in a shootout, with that Júlian Alvarez penalty ruled out. They have faced more shots than any other team, almost three times as many as Arsenal.
Madrid arrived in London with a treble still on but also having conceded 11 in a week. Arsenal made it three 90-minute defeats in a row: beaten 2-1 by Valencia on Saturday, three days earlier in the Copa del Rey they drew 4-4 with Real Sociedad after extra time having been 4-3 down on the whistle. Nor is it just a recent thing, although they have dropped 13 points since the start of February. This was their fifth Champions League defeat and they have lost five more in La Liga. They were also defeated in the Super Cup final by Barcelona. That night they conceded five; in the league against Barcelona they let in four.
“It is a bit the problem we have had all year; it’s been difficult to find a compact block,” Ancelotti said on Tuesday night. They ran 12km less than Arsenal. Which on the face of it may not sound like much, but think of it like this: that’s 10 lengths of the pitch less than their opponents each. Valverde, who has covered more distance than any Real Madrid player, has 14 footballers ahead of him in the Champions League this season. “We lacked football,” Ancelotti said. Football, personality, structure, sacrifice, solidarity. When it came to it, they even lacked the star quality that’s supposed to come as standard.
Ancelotti had felt this wasn’t right from the beginning. On the first day of the season, when Madrid drew at Mallorca, he said they lacked balance, attitude and commitment, that his players had not understood that pressing was not about “one player, or two or three”. Mbappé’s arrival excited everyone but brought other issues and momentarily eclipsed the significance of Toni Kroos’s departure. Perhaps those calling them the new galácticos forgot how the first galácticos finished up.
Fitting it all together wasn’t easy, in terms of personality or play. Faultlines opened up in the dressing room, a manager not so readily heard now. Injuries hurt too, of course, Dani Carvajal’s especially. So did the squad planning. Ancelotti had called Kroos “irreplaceable” and he wasn’t replaced, no midfielder there to do what he did and no solution found. A glance at the benches on Tuesday tells a story too, a lack of strength in depth. After defeat by Milan in the autumn, the coach admitted he was worried. “We’re lacking something,” he said. Something? Madrid lacked almost everything.
Ancelotti moved players and structures. There wasn’t a clear identity but his team tended to wait deeper. “Madrid’s fans are used to rock’n’roll football, not lots of touches,” he said by way of justification, although there wasn’t much rock to it really; instead, it was passive, the threat not always as significant as it might have been, the vulnerabilities not always hidden. And yet over time, of which there still seemed to be plenty, he appeared to have found some sort of formula in 4-4-2.
Dani Ceballos momentarily became unexpectedly significant, the only thing even slightly like Kroos, and then got injured again. Mbappé became Mbappé. Vinícius Júnior stopped being Vinícius Júnior. Rodrygo, always the likeliest attacker to be sacrificed for balance, had made a case to be included which was matched only by the case he subsequently made not to be. “It’s a different formation this year but you want the good players on the pitch,” Ancelotti said on Tuesday night but, watching the second half, you might not have spotted them out there.
And while the lack of a reaction surprised – the failure to do something as time slipped away – the underlying flaws did not. Here, Madrid were exposed more clearly than before – they were playing a better team, after all – but they had been there even when the results were good. “I am confused: I hear people saying we’re playing badly, but we’re league leaders,” Ancelotti insisted not long ago, but he knew better, the feeling lingered that an accident was en route, and they are not leaders any more.
When they beat Manchester City in February, the one genuinely impressive tie to stick in supporters’ minds, a moment to make them think that when it mattered Madrid would be Madrid again, Ancelotti said: “The season starts here.” It didn’t; instead, it went back to the way it had been. When they had lost against Milan on a November night when they hadn’t shown up, a bit like for the Ballon d’Or the previous month, he had admitted: “The reality is what was seen on the pitch,” and that never entirely went away, despite the wins. In week 10, when they won in Vigo, one headline said: “Celta played, Madrid won.” It could have been cut out, kept and used many more times. Until now, their season catching up with them in London. Marca’s cover on Wednesday said: “Humiliated.”
“But,” it added underneath, “for Real Madrid nothing is impossible.” There is still a second leg, a second chance. And so it all builds towards another comeback, another of those nights that defy logic just when it has finally been applied, another lifeline to hold on to for Madrid. “If there is a team in the world that can turn this around it is us,” Vázquez insisted. “If we score one or two early, the third comes on its own,” Courtois reasoned. “We have very little chance but we are going to try,” Ancelotti said.
“We are going to need something unbelievably special, something crazy,” Bellingham said. “But history has proven that it is in not in the character of this club to give up and just roll over. We will need our fans and we have to give them something to grasp on to. We are going to have to show a much better reaction than tonight if we are going to make anything happen. It’s going to take something special to turn it around but special things happen in football and if there is one place where it can, it’s at ours.”
