Once upon a time the Royal

This is the usual way to start a narrative and we all know that, because it is always the same. What no one knows is how the story will end. Those intended for children usually end well; The poor suffer badly.

But there are stories of all kinds, including horror, that also have a large audience. And how does Real’s story end? That’s the big question. We all love stories, especially when everything that happens is beautiful, pleasant, captivating. But when the characters in the story begin to suffer, we suffer with them, although we are confident that the story will have a happy ending.

Last week we witnessed several episodes, all of them rushing through time at a frantic pace, with no time to breathe or manage emotions. Villarreal, Rayo, Valencia… and in all of them we glimpsed the reality of this team, its strengths and weaknesses, all in just seven days.

Depending on what time of the week we conduct the analysis, the result will be one or the other and each person will be left to their own particular understanding.

A few weeks ago, before the end of the year, I thought about the team’s future this season and admitted my inability to issue a definitive prediction. And what happened in the last seven days confirms my suspicions. I think this group can do interesting things but right now it doesn’t have the necessary maturity to guarantee friendly, safe transit. He seems to subscribe to ups and downs, to ups and downs, to living installed at a certain level of instability while waiting for its stabilization.

When I am asked today before a match: What will Real Sociedad do today?, I notice that I do not find an immediate answer, as was the case in the past. I had to think about it, think about it a few times, to realize that I had no idea.

And the story was spoken by the heart; I don’t know this one yet

A sick society

The despicable behavior of some Valencia fans on Sunday at the Mestalla was another episode of many of the same traits we have witnessed in recent times. But let it be clear that no one, no football club has a legacy of this kind of sickening behaviour. And the sad thing about this matter is that specific actions like last Sunday seem to confirm “responses” of the same nature by individuals of the same species in the future. And so we enter a hellish spiral that seems endless.
Football ignites passions, raises emotions to levels that are sometimes hard to contain, but let’s not fool ourselves, football, in this case, is nothing more than a means of conveying our own struggles and projecting them onto “others”, whoever that may be. That is where the root of the matter lies: the problem is not football, but the clear symptoms of the disease that this society manifests. The solution is not to expel two, five, twenty one hundred individuals from the stadiums, but to correct the root of the problem. And that goes beyond the Special Committee against Violence

2

A worried knee

Umar Sadiqwho is currently on loan at Valencia, has no option to face his Real Sociedad teammates on Sunday at the Mestalla. It is assumed that Valencia is not willing to pay the “fear clause”, but perhaps the most frightening thing is that the Nigerian striker’s knee injury, which is the official reason given to justify his absence, is more than a problem.

3

We are not talking about ciccioline

These are the words of the president of Lazio, Claudio Lotito, to refer to the case of the club’s falconer – the Laziale eagle is one of the club’s symbols – John Barnabascame under fire after publishing a photo of his new penile prosthesis on social networks. The president of Rome, who claims to act in defense of the club’s moral values, is inflexible with his former employee: if you break the sports rules, there will be no forgiveness