The summer championship, the one played without a ball, the one for signings, is over, and although we won't be able to say until the end of the season which clubs made the best investments, it's clear who the two big winners are today: Real Madrid and Inter Miami.
Each according to their goals, they both won the lottery. Madrid plays real football, Miami plays celebrity football, but the signings of Jude Bellingham and Lionel Messi have generated more excitement than any other this summer. That's what signings are all about, excitement, and that's what football is all about, because it's the essence of all the feelings it arouses, as Florentino Pérez once explained to me.
When it comes to signing players, no one can compete with Florentino. You know, Ronaldo, Zidane, Figo, Cristiano, Modric. And now Bellingham, who was not even born when Ronaldo, Zidane and Figo arrived in Madrid, who at 20 years old seems to be the best English player of all time. Will it live up to the other galactics? It is not disposable.
Florentino embodies Real Madrid, a club that both longs for the old days and competes for everything in the present. The president of the white club sees Bellingham play today and images of childhood, of the Madrid that made the jump to glory in the fifties, with Alfredo Di Stéfano at the helm, must be going through his mind. Bellingham is the most similar to Di Stéfano that has been seen in Madrid since that time.
The first of the troika of Argentine giants, the others being Maradona and Messi, Di Stéfano patented and brought to its maximum expression the phenomenon of the all-terrain player, the one who defends, organizes, creates and scores more goals than anyone else. Bellingham is going that way. He is exceptionally quick thinking, tall, strong, fast, tenacious and elegant. And even if he exudes the charisma of a champion, he touches the ground.
This, as he never gets tired of saying, he owes it to the parents, good people, everything indicates, who remember Rafa Nadal's family. The father is a police sergeant, the mother works, or used to work, because she doesn't need it now, in a human resources office. He's white, she's black: another plus. The only definitive way to solve the eternal problem of racism is for people of different ethnicities to come together and have children until we are all a mixture of all. It's a utopia, but Bellingham is a flesh-and-blood vision of a better future.
Since he is young, he has time for everything to go wrong. Because of injuries, perhaps, or because the fame and money go to his head and he loses the competitive tension without which, so much talent, everything goes to shit. The same can be said of Carlos Alcaraz, but for now both he and Bellingham, who are the same age, give reasons to think that heaven on earth awaits them.
Messi, almost as old as the parents of the two prodigies, has already arrived in the earthly paradise. Today we walk through the nirvana of retirees that is the MLS, the professional league in the United States. He chose well. The other options were to return to Barcelona or go to Saudi Arabia.
What was better for Barça, to bet on a Messi in decline (although in MLS he can hide it) or on Lamine Yamal, the free signing of the year, a 16-year-old boy who can perfectly have an impact similar to the Blaugrana team we already know Bellingham will have in Madrid? Of couse. Messi's return would have been a bet for nostalgia, not for the future.
Saudi Arabia? A golden cage. Miami, the capital of Latin America, is a place where he, his wife and their three children will feel infinitely more at ease. They will be able to enjoy asaditos, alfajores and sweet milk for a tube. Yes, Messi too, if he wants. He doesn't have to be in top form to make a splash in a league where his defenders wouldn't find buyers in the second European divisions. It already swept away. Thanks 99 percent to him, Inter Miami has gone from being the worst to the best team in MLS.
There is also no celebrity in the United States today bigger than Messi and, far from fading into oblivion in the desert like Cristiano, he can transform his notoriety into all the money he wants. Messi, as he would say, broke it. And his new club, too.
