OPEN THREAD — Misplaced Euphoria: 28 Apr. 2026

A Collection of Letters

“I hope one day these words find you.” — **[censored**]

**Writer’s Prelude.** Today you’re ready for something fresh.

To Whomever Will Understand,

**Quick Disclaimer.** Fuck it — I spent a solid hour writing a DT and I just scrapped it because quite frankly it was bloated nonsense so I’m just going to keep it as unapologetically and authentically real, so just as a disclaimer for you kids out there — 1) ignore any typos because I’m speedrunning this with my limited time; 2) read everything I write really slowly before critiquing, I’m happy to address critiques but I need them to not be half-baked; and 3) I may swear a bit. This won’t be as refined as the DT I just deleted because it just doesn’t need to be. ***Also new edit — this is taking so much longer than I want so this is only Part 1. Part 2 will drop tomorrow.*** But anyway let’s just get to the matter at hand. **Tired**. Maybe I should just name names, but I’m pretty tired of the narratives / agendas that have pervaded MM for the majority of what has now become a truly brain-numbing season. I’ve tried to bite my tongue at times but it’s painfully obvious that the issues at Real Madrid are complicated and are much deeper than Mbappe or Vini or the lack of a controlling midfielder. I’ve had my fill of reading “we need a Joselu-type” striker while knowing that a) the people clamoring for the striker (example Hala\_Croatia) ***hated*** Joselu when he was at the club, b) Gonzalo Garcia (a more traditional striker) rots on the bench, and c) anyone who has followed Real Madrid would note that we haven’t firmly started a Joselu-type striker since the early 2000’s. I mean like let’s be serious MM — world football doesn’t start Joselu-type strikers besides Manchester City and they were pretty awful for the majority of this season. So yes — I’m tired of waking up, seeing the same arguments, and then commenting “You still don’t understand.” When the truth is staring all of us in the face but for some reason we are all either too scared or disillusioned to exclaim it: **our board is outdated when it comes to the sporting aspect of a football institution.** **Real Madrid is much more a *marketing* club than a *football* club.** **The Truth**. Florentino Perez, JAS, Juni Calafat, and conq feel free to add anyone else’s name who still has a relative pulse — are the primary issue at Real Madrid CF and they’ve been the primary issue since at least 2018. Now I understand that since 2018 we’ve won 3 La Liga titles and 2 CLs, so there’s going to be a crowd which is likely about to say **“Juni — we have more CLs than any other club during this period…how can this be so? How can you say that our board have been the central issue against our dominance when quite frankly our results have been relatively positive for this 8 year period?”** Well, let me just say this: a) **European football is first and foremost a money game, if your club is rich you’ll likely position yourself to win titles.** Is it guaranteed? *No.* But statistically are you likely going to beat out most teams? *Absolutely.* I don’t think I really need to elaborate this but throwing money at problems is a really quick way to solve a lot of your issues. Let me take some time to do a quick win-win narrative wise – take for example PSG. PSG lost Kylian Mbappe for free during the summer 2024 — how did they solve this issue….by spending 155M that summer on Desire Doue, William Pacho, and Joao Neves (all key members of their treble winning squad). Oh and you know what else they did when Barcola and co weren’t clicking and Luis Enrique’s squad finished 15th in the CL league stage — they spent 80M on Kvaratskhelia in January. **So to everyone saying Mbappe left PSG and the team just clicked, yea it clicked after spending 235M.** **So please don’t bother my sleep with “well PSG only won 1 CL during this time” because broke teams like Celta Vigo didn’t even qualify for the competition**. Go tell Celta fans that money doesn’t talk and then come back to me. Money = Titles or at least gives you a larger margin for error and Real Madrid CF has been Forbes’ most valuable club for nearly two consistent decades. In this 8 year span we’ve spent hundreds of millions on the likes of Hazard, Jovic, Tchouameni, Jude Bellingham (and not to include all the “free transfers” where we simply just gave players like David Alaba, who was central to our 21/22 defense, stupid wages) It’s honestly baffling how frequently we seem to fuck up despite often having considerably more cash than our peers. b) **Since 2018**, despite being one of the brokest institutions in football, firing their club president who was later arrested, facing transfer bans and potential future sanctions, and having a team with significant less market value than Real Madrid (currently Barcelona’s squad value is 200M less than Real Madrid’s), **Barcelona domestically have won the same amount of La Liga trophies as Real Madrid**. I’m only pointing to this domestic competition because as I’ve mentioned and as Zidane has mentioned, La Liga (imo and tbh statistically) is a better reflection of a team’s ability because it is a longer competition which demands weekly consistency. If Barcelona win the title this year, **they will surpass us with 4 titles since 2018 and will have retained the title, a feat Real Madrid hasn’t accomplished since 06/07 + 07/08** (ironically Ramon Calderon was president during this time). Just an added measure to what I think is at times pretty frustrating about our La Liga campaigns, it would be a fun task to think of which Barcelona players make our starting XI. I’d argue that objectively 2-3 would for sure be on our starting XI (i.e., Yamal and Pedri, maybe Raphinha but that’s more based off last year than this year’s form) and the rest we would laugh at if a BBer came and tried to argue that Dani Olmo makes the RM team. c) **this board has pretty much just stumbled onto success for the past decade** and I truly mean stumbled. And I didn’t want to spend the majority of this DT arguing about decisions from 2018 onwards (I preferred to talk about this particular season) but I’ve realized I probably need to really sit down with this and talk about the current season drama tomorrow so let’s just today as a baseline go through a quick timeline of our board’s frantic sporting decisions: 18/19 — Florentino Perez had the arrogance to first sell Cristiano Ronaldo against Zidane’s wishes leading to Zidane quitting, second publicly hire the Spanish NT manager right before the WC, and then third gift said manager who was already hated by a large portion of Spaniards — Mariano Diaz as his premium signing for the 18/19 season. **Anyone with any type of long-term sporting presence, would have laughed at this shortsighted decision making because this clearly wasn’t going to work out — and it didn’t.** If not for this current season, I would say that the 18/19 season was by far the worst season of the past decade. Lopetegui was fired in I want to say October or November. Solari took over (instead of Antonio Conte), and handed an 18-yr old Brazilian the reins of the largest club in the world — culminating with one of the most embarrassing games against Erik Ten Haag and Ajax of all people at the Bernabeu and losing the entire season in a one-week span. Solari was promptly fired as we all knew he would. 19/20 + 20 /21 — Somehow we recoup Zidane back into the fold late 2019 and Zizou + the board successfully navigated COVID. I’ll give them credit for masterfully navigating COVID but I’m a bit tempted to view that as a business decision rather than truly a sporting since the nature of this time was penny pinching / delayed wages / layoffs. Anyway, the board the following year then actively uses the media to pressure and badger Zidane despite a clearly aging squad, failed expensive transfers (i.e., Eden Hazard, Luka Jovic), and the sale of promising youth players (e.g., Hakimi). This reaches a point where Zidane feels a need to pen a letter to ensure that we all recognize the institutional rot at Real Madrid. 21/22 – 24/25 — Yes, now this Carlo 2.0 era is characterized by many as a general success and if you solely focus on the results you’d likely give the board a resounding A+ grade for these 4 seasons. During this time period, Real Madrid won 2 La Liga trophies and 2 CLs which I’ll admit is generally “mission accomplished.” And yes, the youth transfer policy panned out *kinda* (with Fede / Vini / Rodrygo…shhh don’t mention Reiner, Kubo, and Ode). **But I think it’s also imperative to recognize that again the board somewhat stumbled towards success. Please first note that the club didn’t even want Carlo** **Ancelotti.** After Zidane left in 2022, our coaching shortlist was primarily Allegri, Nagelsmann, Pochettino, and I believe the usual suspects of Conte / Mourinho. The primary 3 coaching options said “no.” These managers who most here wouldn’t even touch as of 2026 said “no” to Real Madrid CF — the largest football club in the world. As the legend goes, Carlo somehow managed to call Florentino Perez regarding a transfer and whoop found himself saved from a soon to be retirement at Everton. This is what we truly call saving grace. **This wasn’t a systematic interview or analyzing the squad and pairing it with the right coach. It was a Hail Mary…that worked** And as we all know and I posted yesterday, the continued years during this era were followed with more Hail Mary-esque board level decision making that Carlo and co just panned out to make work. Despite at times languid play in 21/22 from an aging midfield and losing every CL knockout round on xG, Real Madrid won a CL by the grace of Rodrygo Goes clutch gene, Balon D’Or Karim Benzema, sub package French Ceballos, and imo Vinicius Jr.‘s peak season. And then similar to everything that happens to be recently built by this Real Madrid board, the next season was followed with a CDR title, 10pts behind La Liga winners Barcelona and a 5-1 aggregate loss to City, **because the prior season wasn’t actually built on sustainable processes just darts at a board.** We then somehow won another La Liga / CL in 23/24 despite replacing Karim Benzema with a former Stoke City player – Joselu, and Jude “WHO THE FUCK ELSE?” Bellingham. And for this I’m just going to again post what I posted during yesterday’s DT.

**Games in which we scored in the last 10 min goals to gain points:** **• Aug 23 – Celta v Madrid. Jude 81’. Win • Sep 2 – Getafe. Jude 90+5. Win • Oct 28 – Barcelona. Jude 90+2. Win • Dec 21 – Alaves. LV 90+2. Win • Jan 21 – Almeria. Carva 90+9. Win. • Jan 21 – Las Palmas. Tchou 84’. Win • Feb 25 – Sevilla. Modric 81’. Win • April 21 – Barca. Jude 90+1. Win**

**This my friends is 24 points or in other terms 16 points recovered in the final 10 mins of La Liga matches.** Note again — we won La Liga by only 10 points in the 23/24 season and also note that two of these wins are against Barcelona. That is a net swing of 6-12 points for Barca. And I know many of you are about to clamor “But Juni — that’s football. Games are decided in brief moments,” or “Our La Liga title was deserved.” Again, I’ll repeat, I’m not claiming that we didn’t deserve our La Liga title and I’m not discounting the legacy of remontadas. **I’m saying that these type of results are unlikely to be *sustainable.*** It’s unlikely that when **20% of your games have been decided with sheer last minute brilliance that said players will maintain those results the following year**. They’re human. Realistically, you’ll lose those points and then lose La Liga. And that’s exactly what seemed to happen in 24/25 and what we see today. None of that was sustainable. And it was even more evident in 24/25 when we again follow something being haphazardly built with a trophyless season. Why? Because we replaced Toni Kroos the lynchpin of our midfield with Kylian Mbappe (who I love to death but absolutely wasn’t the right profile of player needed for this team) and everyone and their grandmother has somehow been bamboozled to think that swashbuckling Fede can control a midfield when his greatest moments in our shirt have either been complete chaos or him playing as a wide RM / RW / RB. **Now I’ll ask, what sporting decisions since our last success has truly truly made sense and didn’t feel somewhat haphazard**? Again, I like Mbappe and I definitely think we needed a more reliable goalscorer after the 23/24 season but pairing him with Vini never made sense. **It makes marketing sense but not sporting.** Dean Huijsen was signed last minute and honestly he’s been overall great (despite Blanks hating him) but that decision also came with his resurgence in the Spanish NT — a team that has little to no Real Madrid presence. Carreras who started ok but has fallen off the wagon was never a big name LB to takeover for Mendy or Fran Garcia. Trent is a great name but as we see recently cannot actually defend against top teams and Carvajal has noted “walks” in transition. Don’t get me even started on the 60-80M spent on Franco. Endrick is a talent but just that and his development process has been haphazardly approached. I could say the same for Arda who is on the team and is actually good but there’s this weird feeling that he won’t be here any longer. **These transfers again all just feel like darts at the board hoping something comes good. That is not a project.** That feels a lot like C.R.E.A.M and luck. **Temporary Ceasefire.** So I’ve officially run out of time and I’m going to end Part 1 there. Part 2 will feature more commentary on this season’s decision making such as the Great Tantrum, selecting a project manager without a project, and the everlasting Pintus (who even Carlo didn’t like). But I hope from today’s letter you begin to understand that we seem to succeed without thought or plan just sheer individual willpower, which can only get you so far. Cheers, J

It’s Been Awful Pt 1.

***Freddy**: So how’s it been?* ***Juninho:*** *I got some questions, don’t got the answers — still have to find us another way. Lately, I ain’t been trustin’, peepin’ the relentless Mbappe slander — that don’t do nothin’ but demotivate. Don’t nobody can pass or control the hate. **They used to praise Thiago, now what’s a protege?** Better watch what you sayin’ ’cause how we play it — fail compilations singin’, til you can’t find serenitay. Just an unholy night when they on the way. Man, I hope no Coral indictments is on the way. We can fight it, Val & Felipe stay on my case. Keep the sentences lighter, it’s stoned away. ‘Cause we battlin’ life through the order — you givin’ your heart, but not even the DT safe.**Told BSG while he lurked on the MM street to be smart on your back as a target.*** ***He said, “Boy, you know I’m straight”*** *(damn)* ***But, I know he ain’t.*** View Link . . . managingvini.com (brought to you by Juninho + Freddy)