Real Madrid's Struggles: Lack of Team Effort Exposed
The verdict on Real Madrid this season is brutal and, for once, unanimous. On Spanish radio, in bars, on late-night phone-ins, the accusation is the same: this team has stopped running.
The 2-1 derby defeat to Atletico Madrid has not just hurt the league position. It has stripped away excuses. Seven games into La Liga, Real go into the international break in fourth place, already six points behind a rampant Barcelona. For a club that measures itself only against the very top, that gap feels far bigger than the table suggests.
Criticism from the Media
On Cope’s flagship programme "El Partidazo", the callers and pundits lined up with a single target: the players.
Manolo Lama, one of the most recognisable voices in Spanish broadcasting, did not bother to dress it up. For him, the problem transcends the man on the bench.
"Not with Carlo Ancelotti, not with Xabi Alonso, not with Alvaro Arbeloa," he insisted. "The players continue not to put in the effort and not to show solidarity among themselves."
This was not a tactical breakdown. It was an accusation of attitude.
Lama went straight to a sequence that, in his eyes, exposed everything. When Atletico circulated the ball calmly at the back, shuttling passes between the two centre-backs and the goalkeeper, Real Madrid simply watched.
"If Atletico Madrid start passing the ball around, specifically between the two centre-backs and the goalkeeper, Real Madrid would not push forward to press them," he said. There was no high press, no coordinated jump, not even a token sprint to disturb the build-up.
"They would wait," Lama concluded. "And they did not even want to move forward to confront them."
The charge is damning: a Real Madrid side that used to suffocate opponents off the ball now stands off and hopes talent alone will save them.
Further Critiques
Paco Gonzalez, another heavyweight of Spanish sports radio, took the criticism in a different direction but landed in the same place: this squad, as currently configured, cannot execute the kind of collective football the club demands.
"This current Real Madrid does not have the players needed to play, with the exception of Guler," he argued. "Who is able to carry out an organised collective attack at Real with this current line-up? Tchouameni, Bellingham, but the rest, all they offer are individual movements."
The names are telling. Aurelien Tchouameni and Jude Bellingham are praised as rare pieces capable of linking a team together. Arda Guler is singled out as the one true organiser with the ball. Around them, Gonzalez sees chaos: runs without coordination, actions without a shared idea.
Physically, though, he sees no excuse.
"Real Madrid get a 10 physically when you watch them, so physically they can beat anyone," he said. The legs are there. The power is there. The sprints are there. What is missing, in his view, is football.
"But in order to play football, there is only Guler," he added, doubling down on the idea that the squad is stacked with athletes and soloists, short on brains and links between the lines.
The criticism did not stop with Real’s own dressing room. Gonzalez also pointed to players like Konate and Dumfries as examples of a wider structural issue: defenders and wing-backs who struggle to bring the ball out from the back in systems that demand it.
"Konate and Dumfries do not have a good ability to bring the ball out from the back," he said. "It is a huge problem relating to the style of play and the players."
The implication is clear. When a club wants to dominate with the ball and build from deep, it cannot afford passengers in possession. For Real Madrid, the debate now cuts to the core: is this a tactical malaise that a coach can fix on the training ground, or a squad built with too many runners and too few thinkers?
As the international break arrives, the table shows a six-point gap to Barcelona. The airwaves suggest something more serious: a belief that Real Madrid, for all their physical power and individual brilliance, no longer move as one.
