Real Madrid's Trophy Win: Midfield Concerns Linger

Real Madrid lift a trophy. The doubts stay exactly where they were.

Mourinho’s side edged past Deportivo La Coruña to win the Teresa Herrera Cup at Riazor, a result that looks good on paper and little else. For those who have watched Real Madrid’s pre-season closely, the friendly title is decoration, not disguise.

On SER Deportivos, journalists Antonio Romero and Tomás Roncero broke down what the night really revealed. Their conclusion was blunt: this team still has a hole in midfield, and it is big enough to shape the entire season.

Romero began with a caveat. Pre-season, he reminded listeners, can deceive. Real Madrid, in his view, are operating at only 20 to 30 percent of their potential. The legs are heavy, the ideas not yet sharp. But even through that haze, one issue stands out.

Real Madrid, he insisted, lack a true playmaker in the middle of the pitch. The rest of the structure looks formidable. Mourinho has built a side that can defend in waves and attack with almost ruthless inevitability. Between those two lines, though, the engine still splutters.

Roncero pushed the argument into the boardroom. The failed move for Rodri Hernández, he said, cannot simply be brushed aside as a missed opportunity. It leaves a clear tactical and strategic void.

“If you wanted to sign Rodri and you did not, that means you have to fill that void,” he argued. Leave it unaddressed, and the team will feel that absence from August to May. The club, he warned, can no longer pretend the question of that missing profile is secondary.

So how do you win without the perfect midfielder? Romero pointed to what he called “the Mourinho method”. If any coach can sidestep a structural flaw and still build a winning machine, he argued, it is the Portuguese on the Real Madrid bench. Mourinho has made careers out of bending systems around what he has, not what he wishes he had.

Even so, Romero did not romanticise the challenge. The benchmark, he reminded everyone, is brutal: the most successful Real Madrid side in history had Casemiro, Kroos and Modrić patrolling the middle. That is the standard against which this new version will be judged.

One name, for Romero, offers a possible sacrifice in the current market: Bernardo Silva. Drawing on what he saw in La Coruña and what the Portuguese has shown at Manchester City, Romero suggested Bernardo has the intelligence and work rate to accept a deeper, more selfless role.

He pictured him as a soldier for Mourinho, operating next to Tchouaméni, knitting play, offering support, and echoing, in flashes, the influence of Modrić. It is a demanding brief, and Romero was clear about who he does not see in that job right now: not Camavinga, not Arda Güler, not Bellingham, not Valverde.

New Faces

The conversation then moved to the new faces already through the door. Here, Romero asked for something increasingly rare around the Bernabéu: patience. Yan Diomande, he reminded fans, is not yet twenty. The jump he has made is enormous.

Real Madrid is not a place where you live off five bright minutes with Leganés. It is another planet entirely, where every touch is judged, every mistake magnified. Diomande will need time, and the club, if it is serious about his development, must give it to him.

If Diomande is the slow-burn project, another signing is already stirring excitement. Romero reserved special praise for Cucurella, a full-back whose style feels tailor-made for the Bernabéu’s taste.

Diomande may draw the headlines for now, he said, but the player many supporters truly want to see flying down the wing in Madrid is Cucurella. There is a certain type of left-back the stadium falls for instantly, and Romero placed him in that lineage.

Since Marcelo and Roberto Carlos, he suggested, there has been a lingering hope in the stands: the return of a vertical, daring left-back who can tilt games on his own. If Cucurella can tap into even a fraction of that tradition, Real Madrid’s flank might once again become a runway.

The trophy from Riazor will sit nicely in the cabinet. The real story, though, lies in whether this version of Mourinho’s Madrid can solve the riddle in midfield before it defines their season for them.