When Alvaro Arbeloa took on the job of being the interim manager at Real Madrid, he did so with one goal and only one goal in mind: to reunite the team and get everyone on the same page in the way Xabi Alonso had failed to. Arbeloa praised all the superstars at Real Madrid, gassed everyone up, and tried to create a positive environment similar to that of the one Carlo Ancelotti had fostered before.
It worked for a couple of months, but the bitterness in the squad, the jealous personalties on the bench, and the apparent faction war behind the scenes took hold. Real Madrid are in shambles at a personal level, and things all came to a head after the Real Oviedo game, which Madrid won by the way, after superstar Kylian Mbappe decided to go rogue because Arbeloa dared to bench the delicate prince.
Recall that just a few days before, Mbappe bailed out of El Clasico at the last minute because of an injury, yet now he is upset that the manager wanted to take it easy with him after an apparent aggravation by having him come off the bench against Oviedo.
Kylian Mbappe is mad it's not all about him
Mbappe decided to throw a tantrum at the manager's expense, and even though he had said nothing in support of Xabi Alonso like this for months, he decided now was the time to throw Arbeloa under the bus and say that things were better in the first half of the season because there was more of a structure. He decided to invoke the baseless speculation in the media that the others got Alonso fired, that he had nothing to do with it, and that he and his buddy Aurelien Tchouameni are just mad at everyone because of what happened to Alonso.
But credit to Alvaro Arbeloa. As much as he has been as bad of a pushover as president Florentino Perez with giving in to the star players - and we can't pretend that Vinicius Junior and Fede Valverde were behaving properly under Alonso, of course - he finally grew a pair and stood up to Mbappe.
He delivered this gem of a line in response to Kylian Mbappe bringing up Xabi Alonso at the press conference after Real Madrid vs. Oviedo, via the Madrid Zone, "Kylian said the team had a structure in the first half of the season then lost it in the 2nd half? I don't know. Maybe he scored more goals in the 1st half than in the 2nd half of the season."
That is exactly it. Kylian Mbappe has always been Team Mbappe No. 1 in his career, whether in Paris or in Madrid, and Madridistas were arrogant not to listen to the PSG fans who warned him about his tendencies, thinking they were somehow superior because "this is Madrid and that doesn't happen". Well, it is happening. Mbappe has gone full rogue because the manager isn't catering to him and his need for empty calorie statistics, and now everyone has to suffer for it.
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