WARSAW, Poland — For “winning” clubs, preseason has always been about hunger. In one form or another.
Initially, it was all about compensating for the damage that hunger can cause when players relax and spend the summer stuffing themselves with beer, desserts and crisps. To put it bluntly, many footballers returned from summer break several kilos heavier and, in some cases, downright fat. More on that in a moment.
Real Madrid are the perfect example of how hunger, at its most fanatical and driven, will be key to winning some or all of the record seven trophies at their disposal during what looks like a 334-day season that begins in Warsaw against Europa League champions Atalanta on Wednesday in the UEFA Super Cup and may not end until the Club World Cup final on July 13, 2025.
The biggest and most important teams will always be packed with talent. There is no doubt about that. However, their best players are increasingly stretched as they have less and less time to train their physical and athletic resources intensively.
Players' union FIFPRO has sued FIFA for what it claims is a violation of “fundamental rights” – namely the ability to enjoy a humane amount of rest between matches and between seasons.
For all the skill, professionalism, commitment and good coaching of elite clubs, the vital factor is that their dominant players are not motivated by wages, or even by personal pride, but by a pure, insatiable hunger to compete, win and lift trophies. And do it again and again.
Considering how different this modern era is, you might have thought I was joking about the state even the greatest players were in when summer rolled around.
Pre-season was indeed hell on earth, designed primarily to make the players lose weight. They sweated, sometimes wearing bin bags under their training clothes to multiply the loss of fluids. They ran and ran until their legs gave out, barely kicked a ball and were weighed relentlessly.
But then preseason lasted forever.
Roy Keane recently told an anecdote about the call Steve McClaren made to him after two days of Manchester United summer training to express his concerns about the Irishman's performance. Keane, in industrial language, reminded Sir Alex Ferguson's assistant that there were “four or five weeks” left to get things right and that he had to stop panicking.
It seems like the sentiment is a century old, but in reality it was only a couple of decades ago. Today, elite players typically do a week-long pre-season and are then expected to play at full strength. Injuries? Let's not even mention them.
Ronaldinho, shortly after winning the Ballon d'Or, practically ended his career at Barcelona due to his weight gain. Ronaldo Nazário (and those are two of the best footballers of all time that I have highlighted) was several kilos overweight when he was a star of Real Madrid. As for Eden Hazard's physique when he showed up to train with Real Madrid, The whites In the summer of 2019, the less said, the better.
Last week in Charlotte, after his side beat Chelsea, Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti revealed: “The players who came on tour are now in good shape, we'll see what form the last few lads are in. They've been working at home during the break, let's hope they're in good condition when we finally train with the full squad. If not, no problem, everyone will be on the bench!”
He said it with a typical wink at Ancelotti, but don't even think about how serious he was.
Now Dani Carvajal, Aurélien Tchouaméni, Eduardo Camavinga, Ferland Mendy, Jude Bellingham and Federico Valverde (the lads in question) are so admirably slim, fit and hungry that they will play their first competitive game of the season, for a trophy that Madrid has pledged to win, after more or less a week of training. It's incredible.
Like the scrapping of the back-pass rule or the introduction of VAR, the rapid evolution of summer football training from a purgatory for the fatties to a parade of the permanently fit has been absolutely revolutionary. Whatever scrutiny Kylian Mbappé is subjected to when he pulls on his jersey, The whites'The famous shirt he wore for the first time against Atalanta, his physical silhouette and the tightness of those shorts will not be part of it.
Ronaldo was a kid when he was making his debut for Madrid and his idol has always been Zinedine Zidane (who attended a clinic in the Dolomite mountains in the summer to ensure he was super-skinny for Madrid's pre-season training). The 25-year-old French forward is a role model for this relatively new and fit generation.
He is at the Bernabéu to turn it into his footballing Garden of Eden, not to replicate the silhouette of Eden Hazard. Not that anyone doubts Mbappé's hunger. He wants to “eat the world”, as they say in Spanish about the ambitious, not eat the dessert cart.
What might be worrying is that he was beginning to look like someone fed up with football's voracious demands for more, more and more of its key resource: talented, creative and imaginative players.
Recall Paris Saint-Germain's two Champions League semi-finals against Borussia Dortmund in May, an opponent the French champions vastly outclassed in terms of raw talent. Mbappé was noticeably out of touch, his normally agile feet looking more like Fred Flintstone's than Pedro Astaire's.
This is not a criticism, no one can question his willingness to continue taking risks. For someone who is approaching 500 games with the senior team at the age of 25, his CV says it all: always available, always hungry to play, score, compete and win.
But when he received another award at the age of 23, he had the vision to warn: “We like to play, but it's too much. If people want to see quality, we have to take a break.”
I was at Mbappé's last game of last season, the Euro 2024 semi-final against Spain in Munich.
He and France were two steps away from winning the Euros, and the new Madrid… Galactic configuration The Blues First goal. Afterwards, he was again a bit listless, determinedly searching for the highest gear, but unable to connect with fourth, much less fifth.
I think the French have a word for it: exhaustion.
After the quarter-finals, France coach Didier Deschamps admitted that Mbappé asked to be taken off the pitch – a first for his career.
“Kylian is always very honest with me when he doesn't have the ability to accelerate,” Deschamps said. “He's not in his best form… he was feeling very tired. There was no point in leaving him on the pitch.”
That defeat against Spain was just a blink of an eye. He has had approximately three weeks without stress before reporting to training. That is not enough, at least if we now want to see quality throughout the year.
What Madrid will discover is that it owes a debt of gratitude to its former midfielder, Luis Enrique, a persona non grata at the Bernabeu since leaving for Barcelona on a free transfer in 1996. The now PSG coach spent time last season conducting one-on-one video sessions with Mbappe showing his pressing deficiencies, detailing the need to help his full-back and educating the forward on how those deficiencies were damaging to the team and match strategy.
Mbappé is brilliant and dedicated to improving; those are not lessons he will throw away along with his blue and red jersey now that he has finally left Paris.
When I spent 40 days with Spain over the summer, coach Luis de la Fuente described one of his key players, Mbappé's new Madrid teammate Carvajal, as a “Spartan”. He said: “Dani doesn't stop because he's insatiable, he's a born competitor. He's a Spartan, someone prepared for the fight, for the work, for the effort.”
Mbappé has joined that. That's Madrid. He will adapt, he will learn. But he will have to add that last element of tungsten hardness to his mentality: the team and the club first, always. Personal glory a distant second, plus a total acceptance of the all-for-one, one-for-all mentality.
That's a level above what he's reached so far. Once that happens, he'll be a valuable asset.
I assume this first trophy will be won. Madrid is simply better than Atalanta at crossing the finish line when not in top form. It's a good guess.
Next up is a brutal training session that will last almost a year (not counting national team commitments) for the Madrid squad. Is it really possible for them to win all seven trophies? Wouldn't it be enough to win the big three (La Liga, Champions League and Club World Cup)?
The loss of veterans Toni Kroos and Nacho will be felt, but the youngsters will step up and most of the fundamental attitudes will not change one bit. I think Madrid will win La Liga. I think they are in a position to win the Champions League, perhaps above all because of their hunger, not just because they are still absolutely packed with players of the most divine ability.
