Just like in their most memorable matches, which will remain in the memory forever, Madrid almost exploded in stoppage time. the longest and biggest ticking time bomb on the football planet this Monday at 7:28 PM. It wasn't in 2021 or 2022, frustrating summers for Madrid, nor in 2017, when Mbappé played for Monaco and opted for Paris. It was 2024 and the painful wait of months and years of Real Madrid fans for the Frenchman, a wait that had gone through every possible mood (joy, euphoria, disappointment, anger, rage, anticipation), became at that moment two days. after winning the 15th Champions League, in an absolute outpouring of happiness: the feeling that Mbappé, an outspoken Real Madrid fan but a Bondy Frenchman, and a PSG player for the past seven years, had arrived home. Real have done well these years, even when things went wrong.

“We did for this boy what we have never done for anyone. And not because we needed it, because we have players up front and two world stars (Vinicius and Rodrygo) in development, but because it is different. It gave us something different. Mbappé is a hand grenade in the backpack. The game doesn't freeze, are we playing poorly? We have a grenade in the field. We did everything we had to do. And we lost”, a Real Madrid manager revealed two years ago, hours after Mbappé wrote to Florentino Pérez to tell him that, contrary to what had been verbally agreed, he was staying in Paris. Football, an area of childhood passions, is subject to these kinds of emotional ups and downs. But that refusal took place on the eve of a Champions League final in Paris. That European Cup was lifted, and another was lifted just two years later in London. Vinicius and Rodrygo are already world stars: there is nothing to cook. There's a beast coming from Brazil, Endrick. And Jude Bellingham has emerged. Mbappé no longer arrives to save the desert crossing due to Cristiano Ronaldo's departure, as previously attempted; Mbappe arrives, and that adds more pressure, keeping things the same.

“Football is complex and you quickly forget both the positive and negative experiences. You always have to adapt and reinvent yourself,” Mbappé told GQ magazine a few months ago. Real Madrid, which first met Mbappé when the boy surprised in France at the age of thirteen, has been trying to sign the French striker since 2017. It's been a seven-year impossible love story with two infamous sit-ins. . And, as happens with platonic loves full of denials, when it is least needed, when you think about it least, when there are others who have made you forget a little, it shows up at the door of the house. Losing (a lot of) money and promising absolute integration in a team that is so well-oiled that they throw the Ballon d'Or at each other. He is such a huge striker, so overwhelming, with such overwhelming circumstances, that there is no question of his place: more than a hand grenade, he is an atomic bomb. There is a prejudice, yes, about what his arrival in the dressing room may cause, a prejudice that is too reckless given that he is a global star with years of experience and expensive advice; Even that certainly plays into the favor of Mbappé's delay in arriving in Madrid: he is not that young, and he ends up at a club that does not need him to win everything. He needs it because he has always needed the best players in the world. and because the show can only go on at the new Santiago Bernabéu.

There is no reprieve in Madrid, where titles are demanded on the same day they are celebrated (see Florentino Pérez demanding the 16th and Ancelotti sighing: “What pressure”). Nor have the galacticos returned, the plethora of stars from Pérez's first term in Madrid with whom he wanted to build a (failed) dynasty that would last for years. The years have been going on since 2014 with survivors here and there and what comes now is the hunger of others, including Mbappé, who has won everything except what he dreamed of as a child: the European Cup. The marriage announced this Monday promises wild alliances on the pitch with strikers and midfielders discovering their better fit with each match. Off the field, the alliance is an iron hammer in the market of passions, shirts and money: the union of the Mbappé and Real Madrid brands, so often imagined, so often cherished, is now a reality. And it promises what Madrid usually gives in modern bids with clubs with unlimited money, what Jorge Valdano said: a story to tell, a glory to build on.

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