Real Madrid after the Madrid derby: Diagnosis from the dressing room, not the referee's whistle

At the fifth minute of the second half, the ball had not yet rolled on the grass. Inside the VAR operations room, a small screen displayed the match clock. I looked at it, not to measure stoppage time, but because Real Madrid had just returned to the pitch five minutes late. It was a small detail, the kind of detail the stands never remember. But in my profession, small details are precisely what determine everything. Before blowing my whistle, I review myself. That is the sentence I tell myself every time I sit in the chair. And in the recent Madrid derby, there was far too much to review. It was the match in which Real Madrid faced Atletico Madrid. The result mattered less than the way it unfolded. A red card for Huijsen. A brawl in the tunnel. Two red cards. And a move I had never seen in decades of work: Real Madrid TV, the club's official media channel, attacking referee Ortiz Arias, alleging a connection to Barcelona. When a club uses its own media to attack a referee, it is no longer an emotional reaction. It is a strategy. And I do not believe in strategies built on emotion. To understand this derby, one must place it in its proper context. Real Madrid entered the clash with Atletico not as an excited team, but as a scrutinized one. The season is at a stage where every match is measured by the most invisible yet merciless yardstick: expectation. And when expectation has been pushed to the championship threshold, any result below that threshold is read as a sign of decline. Makelele, a man who needs no introduction to anyone who has loved French and Madrid football, spoke up. He did not talk about tactics. He did not talk about formations. He talked about understanding. And that is precisely what made me pause. For when a former player of Makelele's calibre speaks of "a lack of understanding between players, and between players and coach," he is not describing a technical problem. He is describing a communication problem. Makelele also added that the coach needs to talk more with the players. This is not tactical advice. It is an indicator of a vertical power gap. At the age of 60, with more than four decades around football pitches, I have learned one thing: when a team loses, the public usually looks at a disallowed goal, an uncalled penalty, a controversial red card. But the coaching staff looks at the dressing room. And in this case, what emanates from the dressing room matters more than anything that happens on the pitch. Here, one point about how I read events must be made clear. I have spent most of my career reviewing plays. Every judgment needs one review, including the judgment of data. But what I realized in this derby is this: there are problems that slow-motion footage cannot display. A rift in communication is one of them. You cannot draw an offside line for the silence between two teammates. You cannot measure with xG the distance between a coach and his captain. So what actually happened in this derby? Let us begin with what can be verified. Real Madrid returned to the pitch five minutes late after half-time. This is an objective violation, easily processed under RFEF and La Liga regulations. No debate needed. No camera angle needed. Just a clock. In the Spanish football disciplinary system, delaying kick-off is an administrative fault, usually leading only to a fine. But at the level of a club like Real Madrid, the fine is not the problem. The problem lies in repetition. Before that was Huijsen's red card. He is a defender who only entered the elite football picture in the 2026-2026 period. And after that came two red cards, along with a brawl in the tunnel. When these events are placed side by side, they are no longer isolated accidents. They form a pattern. And a pattern, in disciplinary analysis, is more concerning than any single event. The release of VAR audio, in the sense of publishing the recording between referee and VAR room, is also a signal. In many major leagues, releasing VAR audio is typically a transparency move, aimed at calming referee-related tensions. Its presence here suggests the federation is proactively managing the aftermath of the match, rather than letting it unfold on its own. That is a governance-neutral signal, but it also shows the severity of what happened around the match. I do not trust my eyes, I trust slow-motion footage. But in this case, the slow-motion footage was not on the screen. It was in what the team did after the final whistle. Let us talk about what Real Madrid can control. This is the core of this analysis, and also the part that I, after many years in the profession, consider most important. Game structure, control of midfield, quality of one-on-one duels, and coordination in building attacks. These are four categories a top team can and must control. No referee can ruin those four categories. No VAR can intervene in those four categories. They belong to the dressing room, to the training ground, to the hours of pre-match video analysis. And according to what the club itself admitted, all four categories were weak. When a team cannot control the structure of a match, it means they do not know what shape they are playing in. When they cannot control midfield, it means transitions become a whirlwind the defence is not screened against. When they lose duels, it means they lose the key moments of the match, and those moments often decide the result. When they cannot coordinate in building attacks, it means the distances between lines have widened to the point where the ball cannot travel from one line to another with coherence. These four categories combined form a familiar portrait I have seen many times in my career: a collective with good ingredients but no recipe. And in modern football, good ingredients without a recipe only produce an expensive but tasteless dish. This is the point where I want to pause more carefully. In recent years, I have observed a notable trend in big clubs. When results do not come, the first reflex of management and the public is to seek an external cause. Referees. VAR. Fixture schedule. Luck. Anything outside the club's control. This is understandable psychologically, but harmful systemically. Because when the cause is placed outside, the solution must also come from outside. And when the solution depends on things you cannot control, you have bound yourself to a passive position. In Real Madrid's case, there is a very clear paradox. The club has admitted the team has problems in controllable categories. But in parallel, it has devoted considerable energy to an uncontrollable category: referees. Real Madrid TV attacked Ortiz Arias. A brawl broke out in the tunnel. Two red cards. All of this happened in a match where, by the club's own admission, the problem was performance, not refereeing. No goal is ever clean, only those who refuse to look back. But no defeat belongs to the referee alone, only to those who refuse to look in the mirror. Let us talk about the numbers concerning players. In post-match ratings, Courtois received the highest score. He played "solidly." Conversely, Mbappe and Vini Jr were noted as having "disappeared." This is a notable polarisation. The defence, or at least the goalkeeper, maintained form while the attack, the most invested and most media-scrutinised department, left no mark. In my analysis, I call this phenomenon "performance asymmetry." When a team has a solid defence and a paralysed attack, the match is often shaped by transition moments. The opponent does not need to attack continuously. They only need to wait for a moment of chaos, when the attack has left the defence behind, and punish that gap. This is a pattern I have studied many times in the context of big clubs being beaten by smaller opponents. But caution is needed here. Mbappe and Vini "disappearing" is not necessarily an individual defect. It may be a systemic symptom. When an attacking player does not receive the ball in the right position, or does not receive it at the right time, he looks as though he has vanished, but in reality he has been abandoned by the system. This is a point I always emphasise in my analysis: diagnose the system, do not blame individuals. Mbappe did not appear out of nowhere, as my model predicted before the world knew his name. But a great player cannot shine in a system that does not pass him the ball. A larger contextual issue must be stated clearly. In the material I analysed, there is one detail that made me pause. The source refers to Mourinho as the current Real Madrid coach, while also mentioning Huijsen, a defender who only entered the elite picture around 2026-2026, taking a red card in a Madrid derby. This combination has a chronological problem. Mourinho coached Real Madrid from 2026 to 2026, long before Huijsen became a notable name. This means the source material I am processing is hypothetical, synthetic, or speculative commentary. That is an important methodological note. In my profession, one chronologically wrong data point can destroy an entire conclusion. So I read everything presented here with a high degree of caution, and I recommend readers do the same. This does not diminish the value of the analysis. Because the problems of communication, structure, and discipline we are discussing are universal problems. They exist at any big club, at any time. And how to handle them is what is worth discussing. Returning to Makelele. He said the coach needs to talk more with the players. It sounds like simple advice, but it actually points to a deep structural problem. In a team with a centralised power model, when the coach is a high-authority figure, the message can become rigid. When the message is rigid, players may stop listening. When players stop listening, understanding between parties collapses. And when understanding collapses, tactics, however sophisticated, become meaningless on the pitch. This is why I always say the most common tactical problem in elite football is not a wrong formation, but a message that fails to transmit. A wrong formation can be fixed in a week. A message that fails to transmit can take a whole season to fix. And here is the counter-intuitive point. While the public and media pour over the referee's whistle, over VAR, over controversial decisions, the real problem lies in a place the cameras never point at: the dressing room. No slow-motion footage records the moment a player stops believing in his coach. No VAR audio records the moment a captain stops conveying the coaching staff's message to his teammates. But one thing must also be acknowledged: referees are not inviolable creatures. When a club like Real Madrid, with enormous media power, attacks a specific referee, questioning his alleged connection with Barcelona, that is a calculated act. Historically, national football federations have investigated clubs that use their own media to pressure officials. This is a governance risk distinct from on-pitch disciplinary risk. And in my understanding, it may be a sign of a deliberate pressure campaign, one that federations typically treat as an aggravating rather than neutral factor. Let us look at a precedent. In 2026, Thomas Doll had a famous protest when he held up an A4 sheet of paper to present his views on referees. That event became an iconic image, a gesture remembered for its theatricality. When someone resorts to theatrical gestures, it is usually a sign that they no longer believe in the path of ordinary argument. And in the football context, that is not a positive signal. Technology does not kill football, it kills blind faith. But technology also cannot create human connection, and that connection is the foundation of all success on the pitch. So what is the solution? This is the part I always want to give special attention to, because diagnosis without a recovery plan is merely a complaint dressed up in data. First, on discipline, the club needs to establish strict compliance discipline. Returning to the pitch five minutes late, allowing a tunnel brawl, using official media to attack a referee, all of these form an accumulated disciplinary record. In accumulative disciplinary systems, each small event can raise the level of sanction for the next. This is a tax the club levies on itself. Second, on communication, a structural reset is needed. Not another meeting, but a redesign of how information moves within the team. Who says what, to whom, at what moment, for what purpose. This is an organisational problem, not a personality problem. Makelele was right to place communication ahead of tactics, because tactics are transmitted through communication. Third, on tactics, the controllable aspects must be redefined, and resources concentrated there. Game structure. Midfield control. Duel quality. Coordination in attack. These four categories do not depend on referees, do not depend on VAR, do not depend on the fixture list. They depend entirely on daily work on the training ground. Fourth, on expectation management, a distinction must be made between external pressure and internal standards. External pressure is unavoidable for a club like Real Madrid. But internal standards are controllable. When internal standards are shaped by public opinion, the club has lost the right to self-determination. Looking at the overall picture, Real Madrid's risk in this period is composite, not simply sporting or disciplinary. It is the combination of a structural failure on the pitch, a communication collapse in the dressing room, a series of off-pitch disciplinary risks, and public demands for major changes. When these four elements appear simultaneously, they are no longer four separate problems. They form a risk cluster, and a risk cluster is always harder to handle than individual risks. I have seen risk clusters like this many times in my career. And what I have learned is this: they rarely dissolve on their own. They are usually only resolved when someone dares to name them, dare to look them in the eye, and dares to design a path out. Diagnose the system, do not blame individuals. That is my principle, and I believe it is correct. The collapse of a big club does not begin with a defeat, but with the cracks that the defeat only makes visible. In this case, the cracks have been visible for a long time. The derby was merely the moment the light shone on them. So the question is: what will Real Madrid do with what they have seen? Will they continue to pour energy into what they cannot control, or will they return to what is truly in their hands? In my analysis notebook, I have a note I wrote years ago, after a match I had completely misread. That note is very short: "Which error is worth making?" Football is a game of errors, but the winner is the one who knows which error is worth making. And in the recent Madrid derby, Real Madrid made too many errors in categories where they should have made none. Before concluding, I want to return to a small detail I mentioned at the beginning of this piece. The fifth minute of the second half. The ball had not yet rolled. It is a detail almost no one noticed. But in my analysis, it is the most important detail of the match. Because it reveals something about the team's mental state. A team in good control would never return to the pitch five minutes late. Not because they fear a fine. But because they know every detail matters. And when a team forgets that every detail matters, the distance between them and what they want to achieve becomes very far. I do not know what the future holds for Real Madrid. No one does. But I know one thing: if this club does not resolve the communication problem in the dressing room, then every other change, however large, is only a temporary fix. And if they do resolve it, then the cracks we are seeing can become the foundation of a new cycle. Football always offers a second chance. But a second chance only has value for those who know where they went wrong. And in football, knowing where you went wrong is not a moment. It is a process. A process that demands honesty with oneself, patience with others, and respect for what can be verified. Before blowing my whistle, I review myself. Perhaps Real Madrid should do the same.