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Franck Ribéry stepped into a fresh new year and loudly and immediately fouled it up.
Hello and welcome to SB Nation’s weekly soccer column, back for a whole ‘nother year. Please be advised that this week’s edition contains some extremely childish adult language. Don’t blame us. Blame …
Franck Ribéry!
The turn of the old year into the new is, traditionally, a time for reflection. For taking stock, and for setting goals. And for the celebrities that move above us, this often comes with a little message to the ordinary folk. An inspirational maxim, perhaps. A humble homily.
Footballers are no exception. To choose an example entirely at random, let’s have a look at Franck Ribéry’s Instagram. Apparently the Bayern Munich winger wants us all to begin the new year in a spirit of accuracy and precision:
For 2019, let’s dot the i’s and cross the t’s …
And who could argue with that fine sentiment? We could all do with taking a bit more care over the finer details. Let’s see what else he has to say:
Let’s start with the jealous, the haters, those only born because a condom had a hole in …
Hang on, what?
fuck your mothers, your grandmothers and even your family tree. I owe you nothing.
FRANCK, NO.
In fairness to Ribéry, he wasn’t just shouting at the world for no reason. No, he was responding to criticism he’d received for a previous Instagram post, in which he’d been served a thousand-dollar steak, covered in gold leaf, by the internet’s favourite maverick seasoner, Salt Bae.
(Just typing that sentence made Tactically Naive feel tired on a geological level. Muscles we never knew we had began to ache.)
In some respects, this is an old dance: rich person shows off flashy object; non-rich people point and laugh; rich person castigates everybody else for being jealous haters. It’s a perfectly normal, perhaps even healthy cycle. After all, if we are going to live in a world that contains rich people doing rich people things, we might as mock them, and the rich are free to react as they please. At least until the revolution comes, or they legalise eating the poor.
Of course, Tactically Naive has never been, and likely will never be, in a position to actually try a gold-covered steak. If we ever were, we’d almost certainly panic and run out of the room. We accidentally ate some of the wrapper of a Ferrero Rocher once, and that wasn’t very nice. Perhaps we are the jealous haters.
Still, there’s something about that gold-covered steak that resonates beyond its mere tastelessness. (Which is literal, as much as anything else: edible gold leaf is tasteless and does nothing for the human body on its passage through.) It’s just so shiny. So thoroughly Champions League. If we’d made it up, it would probably be too on the nose, but reality has once again proved that it has no editorial oversight.
Here’s how you cook yourself up some elite football. Take one perfectly innocent piece of almost certainly very tasty meat. Marinate it in Gazprom. Cover it in gold leaf until it stops looking like a thing you might want to eat and becomes, instead, an object whose primary function is to bear witness to its own appalling expense. Film it. Stick it on the internet. Job done. This is the best steak.
Anyway, he may not have meant to, but Ribéry has delivered the perfect start to 2019. Looks like it’s going to be a “Multimillionaire Sports Star Eats Gold Covered Steak, Says ‘Fuck You’ To Critics’ Grandmothers” of a year. Gird yourself accordingly.
Ha ha Madrid
He may not look the part, but Julen Lopetegui is perhaps football’s foremost agent of chaos, and TN is frankly in awe of his work. It’s not just that he managed to get sacked from two of the biggest jobs in Spanish football in the space of a few months. It’s that even now that he’s gone, things are still really weird in his wake.
This is particularly true at Real Madrid, who lost 2-0 at home to Real Sociedad this weekend and are currently sitting — no, languishing! never waste a chance to say “languishing” — in fifth place in La Liga. Fifth, you’ll notice, is not first. It’s ten whole points behind first, which is where Barcelona are. Fifth is behind Sevilla. Fifth is behind Alavés.
Zinedine Zidane is gone in another piece of perfect timing from the great man. Cristiano Ronaldo is gone as well. Gareth Bale is injured, again. And by the time the final whistle went against Sociedad, half the crowd had gone as well. A wall of whistling and white handkerchiefs is one thing; an empty space where the hankies would be is infinitely more insulting.
And isn’t it weird? Madrid, along with Bayern Munich, Juventus, and maybe a couple of others, are one of European football’s few divinely-appointed aristocrats. These are the big clubs that are so comfortable in their bigness — whose bigness seems so appropriate — that whenever they have a duff season it feels deeply unbalancing.
Not all big clubs have this built-in superiority. Barcelona, for example, almost have to have a crisis every three or four seasons just to freshen things up. That feels right. Madrid, though, should always be up there, because that’s what they are for. There’s a reason stories have antagonists, after all. There must always be some malignant force to orient yourself against. That malignant force has no business languishing in fifth.
In a sense, of course, this season was a write-off from the moment Lopetegui went Flopetegui. (TN really hopes that isn’t an appallingly rude word in Spanish. Fine if it is in Catalan, obviously.) Santiago Solari wasn’t meant to be doing this job and, come the summer, he won’t be any more. Enormous amounts of money will be spent. The cycle will begin again.
In the meantime, let’s take our pleasure where we can find it, and roll these José Mourinho rumours around. Might there be a tiny scintilla of counter-intuitive sense in there? Mourinho, as we all know, tends to leave scorched earth behind him. But if the ground is already barren and broken, what happens then?
At the very least, they’d get a little more evil again. That has to be worth something.