When Real Madrid walked off the Camp Nou turf on Sunday evening, Barcelona’s players were already celebrating their LaLiga title behind them. Fireworks in blue and red illuminated the night sky above the stadium as Barça’s squad hoisted the championship trophy, kicking off what would be a lengthy celebration. Madrid, meanwhile, had already departed.
For Real Madrid, this was a night — and an entire campaign — best left forgotten.
The scoreline of 2-0 in the Clásico barely captured the extent of Barcelona’s superiority; the 14-point chasm separating the two clubs in the standings paints a far more accurate picture. With three fixtures still to play, the situation for Los Blancos may yet deteriorate further. Barça sit on 91 points, and a century of points — a milestone reached only twice before in history, by Madrid in 2011-12 and Barça the season after — is now within striking distance. The gap between the two rivals could also surpass the record 15-point differential that Barça established back in 2013.
Such a grim outlook makes it easy to overlook the fact that fewer than two years ago, on June 1, 2024, Madrid were hoisting the UEFA Champions League trophy at Wembley — their second continental crown in three years — having already secured LaLiga. What followed has been two consecutive seasons without silverware, a drought not experienced since 2006.
How did Madrid descend so rapidly? The answer lies less in the playing roster itself. Of the 11 players who took the field in that Champions League final at Wembley, nine are still at the club. The real culprit is a succession of poor decisions in both recruitment and leadership — spanning from the boardroom all the way down to the squad.
The Mbappé Factor
When Kylian Mbappé arrived on a free transfer from PSG in 2024, the move appeared self-evident: bringing one of football’s most prolific attackers into an already successful setup.
Yet voices within the club now openly question whether that decision was sound, particularly given that Vinícius Junior had already cemented himself as the squad’s undisputed leader and a frontrunner for the Ballon d’Or. According to these sources, the Mbappé acquisition was driven primarily by president Florentino Pérez as a personal ambition, rather than as a response to any genuine tactical need.
Statistically, Mbappé has not underperformed — 31 LaLiga goals in his debut season and 24 in the current campaign are hard to dismiss. Yet his presence has visibly disrupted both the team’s shape and its internal dynamics. Three successive managers — Carlo Ancelotti, Xabi Alonso, and now Álvaro Arbeloa — have each failed to construct a coherent system capable of accommodating Mbappé, Vinícius, and Jude Bellingham simultaneously, especially when facing top-tier opponents.
The results speak for themselves. Madrid dropped all four Clásicos against Barcelona last season. In 2025-26, they did claim a 2-1 victory over their arch-rivals in October, but also endured a humiliating 5-2 defeat at Atlético Madrid in September, and have now accumulated six LaLiga losses in total, culminating in Sunday’s decisive encounter at Camp Nou.
On the continental stage, Mbappé has featured in 25 Champions League matches for Real Madrid, with the club losing 10 of those outings — including exits at the knockout stage to Arsenal and Bayern Munich.
Recurring physical problems have curtailed Mbappé‘s availability throughout this campaign, causing him to sit out key fixtures against Manchester City, Benfica, and most recently the Clásico itself.
Questions about the forward’s dedication and professionalism have surfaced for the first time. A vacation taken with his partner during a recovery period — with Mbappé returning to Madrid just minutes before his teammates were set to face Espanyol — generated significant negative attention, though his representatives characterized it as “an overinterpretation” of elements related to a recovery period strictly supervised by the club.
During Sunday’s match at Camp Nou, his contribution from afar amounted to a single Instagram post reading “Hala Madrid” — published after the scoreboard already showed 2-0 to Barcelona.
Heading into next season, Mbappé faces scrutiny of an entirely different magnitude. The criticism directed at him is unprecedented, and he must now prove his worth both individually and as a team player if he is to remain central to Real Madrid’s ambitions.
Alonso Undone by Dressing Room Politics
Xabi Alonso came to Madrid last summer from Bayer Leverkusen with a clear brief: address the permissive culture that had taken root under Ancelotti, impose greater discipline, and build a more structured, collective approach to the game. His time in charge lasted just 233 days.
According to sources with knowledge of the situation, Alonso found himself undermined almost immediately by doubts — both from within the club’s hierarchy and from the squad itself. Director general José Ángel Sánchez had been the driving force behind his appointment, but others within the organization felt Alonso lacked the right qualities for the role: he was perceived as too focused on coaching and insufficiently suited to the symbolic demands of managing Real Madrid.
The skepticism originated with president Pérez and gradually spread to influential players. According to information available at the time, Vinícius, Federico Valverde, and Bellingham were among the senior figures who harbored reservations about the new coach.
Alonso’s position in the Vinícius-versus-Mbappé dynamic was never ambiguous. He had initially considered leaving the Brazilian out of the starting lineup during the previous summer’s Club World Cup, and subsequently benched him on multiple occasions once the domestic season began. The depth of Vinícius’ frustration became apparent when he loudly challenged Alonso’s substitution decision during October’s Clásico at the Bernabéu, in full view of a global audience.
The club offered Alonso no backing in the aftermath. His authority was openly questioned, and the damage proved irreparable. While some squad members continued to support Alonso and his approach, the divisions within the group have persisted.
Results failed to improve, and Alonso was dismissed in January.
Arbeloa: A Brief Revival, Then Collapse
Álvaro Arbeloa stepped in on January 13 with the task of healing the fractured dressing room, bringing key figures like Vinícius back onside, and extracting the best from a squad that the club still believed had genuine quality.
His public persona was one of relentless positivity. Vinícius “embodies what a Real Madrid player is,” Arbeloa declared; Valverde possessed “the spirit of [Madrid legend] Juanito;” Antonio Rüdiger was worthy of “a statue in my garden.”
At first, the approach bore fruit. Madrid responded well, with Arbeloa winning 17 of his opening 21 matches — including victories over sides managed by some of football’s most decorated coaches: Benfica’s José Mourinho, Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola, and Atlético Madrid’s Diego Simeone. Vinícius hit the best form of his career, netting decisive goals against City and Atlético, and visibly embracing Arbeloa on the sideline.
But as the season entered its critical stretch, the shortcomings of Arbeloa’s personality-driven, harmony-first philosophy became impossible to ignore.
In LaLiga, dropped points against Mallorca, Girona, and Real Betis made the title race effectively over. In the Champions League, Madrid were knocked out by Bayern Munich — despite a spirited showing across a tie that finished 6-4 on aggregate. The promising integration of youth-team products like Thiago Pitarch and Gonzalo García was abandoned, and the squad’s longstanding weaknesses — particularly their inability to defend effectively without the ball — resurfaced.
Meanwhile, the dressing room descended into a series of damaging controversies.
According to our publication, Rüdiger became embroiled in a physical confrontation with a teammate, subsequently identified as defender Álvaro Carreras. Sources indicated that Arbeloa’s standing with several players — among them Dani Carvajal, Dani Ceballos, and Raúl Asencio — had deteriorated, and that tensions had also flared between Mbappé and members of Arbeloa’s coaching staff.
Then, in the days before the title-clinching Clásico, news broke that Federico Valverde would be absent from the trip to Barcelona after sustaining a head injury in an altercation with Aurélien Tchouaméni. The club responded by fining both players €500,000 each.
Training sessions in recent weeks have been devoted almost exclusively to damage control and morale management, according to sources — with limited success.
Arbeloa’s public messaging has also shifted noticeably, moving from unconditional praise to veiled criticism of the squad’s collective mentality as performances have declined.
“As I’ve said many, many times, we need to take a step forward collectively,” he stated after the Camp Nou defeat.
“We need a much clearer idea of what we want to do, and to put the collective ahead of the individual. We need a clear idea. That’s the starting point. We’ve dropped many points against teams where we shouldn’t have.”
Boardroom Turbulence
Away from the pitch, Madrid and their 79-year-old president Pérez have been embroiled in a series of institutional battles, with the club suffering setbacks in several of its most ambitious undertakings.
As late as November, Pérez was telling club members at a general assembly that he remained “more convinced than ever” that Madrid would prevail in their legal confrontation with UEFA over the Super League. Just three months later, the club issued a statement confirming a settlement had been reached with European football’s governing body, effectively abandoning any pursuit of financial compensation.
On the domestic front, the €1 billion renovation of the Bernabéu has been complicated by legal challenges related to concert events at the stadium, following complaints about excessive noise levels. Those events remain suspended pending a resolution with municipal authorities.
Pérez’s ambition to restructure the club’s ownership model — opening it up to external investment — also appears stalled, with no indication that the extraordinary general meeting he had pledged to convene will take place anytime soon.
All of this unfolds against the backdrop of two trophy-less years and mounting pressure on the club’s sporting leadership. When Pérez resigned at the end of his first presidential term in 2006 — only to return three years later — he acknowledged that the Galáctico generation had been indulged to the point of dysfunction.
Two decades on, facing a strikingly similar predicament — a star-studded but underperforming squad — he confronts the same charge: that his management style has empowered individual players at the expense of collective success.
Can Madrid Rebuild This Summer?
The coming months will bring a wave of consequential decisions — a new head coach, significant transfer activity, and structural reforms — all of which must be navigated amid what sources describe as a leadership vacuum at the club’s core.
Pérez has long governed Madrid through a highly centralized, presidential model, but his advancing age makes that increasingly difficult to sustain. In the interim, sources say, others are jockeying for position.
Madrid’s coaching appointments over the past decade have consistently favored familiar faces — whether returning managers like Ancelotti and Zidane, or former players such as Alonso and Arbeloa. It comes as little surprise, then, that José Mourinho — another ex-Madrid coach — has emerged as the frontrunner for the position.
Transfer resources are constrained by Madrid’s own standards, with significant sales required before meaningful investment can be made. The modest contributions of last summer’s arrivals — Trent Alexander-Arnold, Dean Huijsen, Álvaro Carreras, and Franco Mastantuono — raise legitimate doubts about the club’s ability to identify and recruit players who will genuinely elevate the squad. Compounding matters is the unresolved situation of Vinícius Junior, whose contract runs only until 2027.
The scale of the challenge facing Madrid is considerable, and the cost of further missteps could be yet another season of failure. Whether the events of recent days mark the lowest point of this cycle — or merely a waypoint on a longer decline — will depend entirely on the decisions made in the weeks and months ahead.
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