Five Bullet Points From Real Madrid’s Win Over Villarreal

These observations — where I look at Real Madrid’s history, its players on loan, Castilla, tactical tidbits, and other relevant thoughts — are now a regular thing. All previous editions can be found here.

Here is a new thing I’m committing to this season: Five semi-informal bullet points after each game.

Also, check out the post-game podcast where Mehedi and I break down the win (and more) for 49 minutes:

• Kylian Mbappe’s and Vinicius Jr’s conversion rates.

Two things that are true: 1) Real Madrid have plenty of problems outside of Mbappe’s and Vinicius’s conversion rates; and 2) Mbappe scores buckets of goals, generally.

Given those two established facts, it’s incredibly harsh to ask Mbappe to score more.

Or is it?

Hold on, I think it’s… completely fair.

Mbappe gets paid the most money, defends the least of any of Real Madrid’s attackers, and does essentially one or two things (only): drop outside the box whenever he wants, and scores goals. We have to hold him to the standards of the best strikers in the world: Erling Haaland and Harry Kane.

Last season, Mbappe’s domestic conversion rate (12.4%) was dwarfed by Haaland’s (21.4%) and Kane’s (24.1%). This season, Kane has started slower (13.1%) while Mbappe hovers at 15.4%. Haaland is at a mind-boggling 25%. The caveat in all this is that if Haaland doesn’t score, he defends and provides a box presence; and if Kane doesn’t score, he defends and provides link up play. If Mbappe doesn’t score, he doesn’t bring anything else to the table.

Those numbers will normalize. Kane and Mbappe will bump up their stats this season, while Haaland won’t sustain his output at this rate. Yet, the main point here is that if the finishing is better, the microanalysis we do daily on the podcast and website wouldn’t matter so much. The reality is Real Madrid should be scoring much more freely than they currently do, especially with an elite creator like Arda Güler on the field. Let’s be honest: Güler should have, minimum, five hundred million assists by now.

Vinicius’s conversation rate is somehow even worse. He sits at a putrid 9.3%.

• The entire Vinicius experience was hard to digest.

Just (literally) seconds before Vinicius was given his red card, I tweeted this:

I thought, up until the hair pull, he legitimately looked really good. He’s almost exactly what the doctor ordered: a jolt of electricity injected into a sleepwalking team. Vini hyped the crowd up, played a great through ball to Mbappe, was vital on Yan Diomande’s goal, and, of course, “scored a goal”.

Just what the doctor ordered!

Almost.

All undone, bizarrely, with a red card. Also: can we please analyze this thing properly? Can we please stop defending the hair pull? Can we please stop slowing the clip down to a quantum level before parachuting down to to signal to everyone how bad they are for stating Vinicius should’ve been sent off? It’s a red card. That discussion ends there.

But here is where there is a ton of merit: The double standards in this league are pretty atrocious. Calls like that almost never go Vinicius’s way. I don’t like the victim card more than anyone else but I completely get the argument that Vinicius — and Real Madrid — often just get called differently.

There are some reasons for that:

• “Unchained Fede”

From this day forth you will see that I have two different names for Fede Valverde:

1. “Just Fede” (this is when he plays in a double pivot alongside Aurelien Tchouameni or Eduardo Camavinga.
2. “Unchained Fede” (this is when he plays on the right wing — whether it’s as a right-back or a right-sided midfielder / attacker).

“Unchained Fede” is Tyler Durden. “Just Fede” is an unnamed narrator.

More Tyler Durden.

• This was the best Marc Cucurella game yet.

This feels like too little of a victory to actually celebrate, but, the bar is low right now (in general, not for Cucurella), and I’m choosing to be optimistic about a player I’m really high on. First of all, with as many problems as Real Madrid had in this game, defense was not one of them. Villarreal did nothing (and I mean absolutely nothing) until Vinicius got a red card and, then — and only then — did Iñigo Perez’s men finally start to enter the final third.

Cucurella put in some awesome challenges and contributed to the energy on the left wing.

• Yan Diomande really needed that.

Though he did make a couple good runs, Diomande was defended really well by Alex Freeman in this game. The couple times Diomande did break free, the last pass let him down.

That’s been a theme for Diomande this season. He’s raw and talented — nothing wrong with that! Any time he’s broken lines with his dribbling, he’s struggled to execute the final play, whether it be a shot or a pass.

It must’ve been such a huge relief for him to see the ball go into the back of the net for the first time. I’m ecstatic for him.