The Good, the Bad, the Beautiful: A burning facade, manager of the year material and the end of hell

Castro is a diminutive figure, with a steely look in his eye, and an unshamed ambition. Behind him are a horde willing to carry out his every wish – battle after battle he’s shown he can conquer any opponent. It’s hard not to get all Napoleonic, as the end of the war approaches.

The Bad: The White House is on fire

Normally this piece tries to stay away from Real Madrid and Barcelona, in the knowledge that their very facial expressions will be pulled apart by psychologists on a daily basis, but such is the blaze at the Bernabeu, it’s hard not to licked by the flames. Following Aurelien Tchouameni and Fede Valverde getting physical, the disaster was consummated by a 2-0 defeat to Barcelona in El Clasico, engraving the Catalans’ name on the trophy in the process. Or so it seemed.

If Real Madrid’s players have looked a shadow of themselves, if Alvaro Arbeloa has seemed to be writing essays between the lines he doles out in his press conferences, President Florentino Perez suggested on Tuesday that rather than trying to keep a lid on it, he has been setting the tone for the internal mayhem unfolding in such theatrical fashion that Pedro Almodovar couldn’t script it. His delirious hour-long tirade felt like the final piece of the puzzle.

How bad do things have to be for the press officer to try and cut off Florentino Perez, Real Madrid President? Not once, but three times. Remarkably, the response to the unanimous criticism was to appear on El Chiringuito – a level of seriousness appropriate for his responses. Not to be left out, if even Perez is taking public shots at his ‘enemies’, Kylian Mbappe decided he would get even for whatever differences he had with Arbeloa the following day.

Over decades, Perez has been characterised by a carefully considered character, a silent power, a man who speaks rarely but is heard in every corridor. No public appearance was made without a message, and there was never any deviation from a mapped out path. This week’s action has been sloppy, fueled by emotion, and expressed with an alarming lack of self-awareness – without getting into the sexist remarks.

Put that beside Mbappe’s post-match pile-on. When the Frenchman arrived, he too had cultivated an image of a considered character. Educated and intelligent, affable, and with just enough personality to stop him veering into the territory of plastic. Mbappe’s latest actions have either been careless or deliberately petulant. The facade of the Bernabeu is up in up in flames.  And for another week, Madridistas are asking: surely it can’t get worse?

The Beautiful: The end of the worst period of your life

If there is something that keeps us coming back to football it is the rawness of its emotional rollercoaster. This week you could find no more crude, no more raw, violent expression of that than at the RCDE Stadium. Espanyol are just three points above the drop, and nowhere near close to safe, but Kike Garcia’s stoppage time goal to make the three points safe against Athletic Club was celebrated like a trophy, a promotion, a survival. More than anything, a liberation.

Manolo Gonzalez called the 2026 run of 18 la Liga games without a win ‘hellish’, and he could have been talking about the just the Athletic game. Twice Los Leones hit the woodwork, on one occasion the ball seemingly magnetised to the six-yard box, but remaining tantalising out of the net. Marko Dmitrovic was working overtime on one of those occasions, and on another, optical illusion made it look as if he had pushed Gorka Guruzeta header through the post.

Pere Milla’s 68th goal was celebrated, but this Espanyol crowd had been burnt too many times before to feel immune to a 19th setback. Hence it wasn’t until Garcia slotted below Unai Simon that players sprinted for the corner, the stands shook and fans cascaded in a writhing mass of emotions. The most emotional, of course, was Gonzalez. Eyes wet with tears. He needed a sit down. This was all too much.

“I haven’t had a good sleep in months,” Gonzalez said after the match. “It has been the worst professional moment and generally [in life], apart from when my uncle died, who was like a father to me. Since I’ve been here it’s been leaps without a safety net, seasons in which we couldn’t afford to fail. The weight on our shoulders was immense.”

Espanyol are not out of it, but they do travel to Pamplona on Sunday without dragging a mental baggage that had taken all the highs of that rollercoaster away for many months