No ifs, no buts, this Real Madrid rank alongside Di Stéfano’s as greatest team ever

Dani Carvajal laid the first stone and applied the final brush stroke. In May 2004, when he was a 12-year-old kid with floppy blond hair and a lifetime before him, he placed Real Madrid’s white shirt into the foundations of their training ground, a new home for an institution that, the legend carved into that granite slab said, “respects its past, learns from its present and believes in its future”. On the first day of June 2024, now a 32-year-old man with a greying beard and a history behind him, he was in Madrid colours at Wembley, leaping to head in the goal that helped secure their greatest work of all.

Twenty years had passed almost to the day, and it was done. How much longer before anyone witnesses this again, if they do? That day Carvajal, an infantil in the academy, stood alongside a 77-year-old Alfredo Di Stéfano, the most significant player whom club football has had, a symbol of their everything; the man whose arrival in 1953 changed Madrid and the game for ever, forging their legend, an identity. Now, when it comes to the European Cup, the competition in which they did it and feel as their own, Carvajal stands above him. Even saying it sounds absurd, a glimpse of what has just happened.

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No one has won this competition more times. A tiny, select group have won it as many. Five men have lifted the European Cup six times and three of them are Carvajal’s teammates: on Saturday he, Luka Modric, Nacho Fernández and Toni Kroos joined Paco Gento, whose seemingly impossible feat has taken 58 years, and one prodigious decade, to match. Carvajal is the only one of this generation to have started all six finals, although he was forced off early in two, his tears there adding poignancy to the goal that pulled them through here.

“I came as a kid and now I’m here,” he said. “It is going to be very hard for this [record] to be taken away from us.”

There were many images, words and moments to hold on to at the end of Real Madrid’s 15th – fifteenth – European Cup. Kroos leaving like that. Vinícius Júnior scoring another Champions League final goal, at 23: “Ballon d’Or, no doubt,” Carlo Ancelotti, the Madrid manager, said. Jude Bellingham, winning the trophy for the first time, aged 20, who said he was holding it together until he saw his mum’s and dad’s faces. Ancelotti intervening again, with calm clarity. “He knows what he is doing,” Bellingham had said. There was the way they did it, which is their way, a story seen before. They had been let off alive, Ancelotti admitted, but they had done it.

You didn’t seriously think they wouldn’t, did you? They have not lost a final in the competition since 1981: played nine, won nine. “It seems that in these games, we’re not able to lose,” Kroos said. “To be level with Gento is crazy, something I never thought I am going to achieve.”

Through all those images, those little vignettes, there was that basic fact, the thing it all built to, that expresses the enormity of this: Real Madrid had just won their 15th European Cup. Now they will ask for the 16th, Ancelotti was told, to which he started laughing. When he eventually stopped, he replied: “It is like that.” As if to prove the point, the president, Florentino Pérez, then said exactly that and this week he will announce Kylian Mbappé’s arrival. But it is a stock phrase. That’s tomorrow and this is now, and always. Forget the next one, at least for a while. Stop. Take it in. Don’t look forward, look back.

Because this is about emulating the eternal, surpassing it even, less perhaps about the 15th than about it being Madrid’s sixth in 10 years: from Lisbon to London, 2014 to 2024. No one has ever done this, except them. Four of this team have won as many European Cups as Liverpool, never mind Gento, the only Madrid player who won their first five European Cups, from 1956-60, and their sixth in 1966.

The ’66 team, known as the Madrid of the Ye-Ye, a transliteration of the chorus from the Beatles’ She Loves You, stood apart, an outlier. Madrid had been knocked out for the first time in 1960 – by Barcelona – and lost the finals in 1962 and 1964. Di Stéfano had gone and economically they were not in good health. The team that beat Partizan in the 1966 final was made up entirely of Spaniards.

If that contributes to this current side perhaps not being seen as emulating Madrid’s golden generation, embodied by winning the first five European Cups rather than six in the opening decade, there are other elements too. That team built Madrid’s identity and comes with an aura of invincibility, of dominance, an imperious march to the title, that this generation may not match. Instead there is the implausibility of these successes: the miracles, the fortune, the goalkeepers suddenly losing their minds, the plain silliness of some of their wins. Even they agreed 2022 was pretty ridiculous. When they were defeated 4-0 by Manchester City the following year in the semi-final second leg, some saw it as justice and the end.

“There’s always a ‘but’,” Ancelotti has said. Rodrygo admitted recently that Manchester City were “better” than them. In this final, again they were made to suffer. The run from 2014 began in the season in which Atlético Madrid were domestic champions, and in the final it took a 93rd‑minute equaliser and an extra-time barrage to beat them. In two of the three they won in a row between 2016 and 2018, Barcelona were La Liga champions and that, Madrid’s then coach Zinedine Zidane admitted, was the most objective test, the title he most valued.

And yet as Kroos presciently said after that elimination in Manchester: “It is not normal to win the Champions League all the time. The last time I heard it was the end of an era was 2019, so we’re OK.” He was right, they were OK; better than that, better than anyone. No buts, this is inescapable: six European Cups in a decade, an achievement to match any, even that one, untouchable in black and white. Sometimes you need to step back from the history you’re making to see that you’re making it. Time changes perceptions, of this era and that one; the past is seen differently and one day this will be the past and it will be glorious.

That Madrid of the 50s and 60s were not unbeatable either but nothing is taken from their achievements and nor should it be. Ferenc Puskas once recalled that Barcelona’s Hungarians would wind him up because they seemed to be able to “do us whenever they wanted”. During the first five years that Madrid won the European Cup, they were Spanish champions twice; Athletic and Barcelona won the league three times between them. When they won the sixth, Atlético won the league. Five teams – Athletic, Barcelona, Atlético, Deportivo, Valencia – have been champions of Spain when Madrid have been champions of Europe.

But so what? Six in a decade, for goodness’ sake. And, actually, this Madrid have a better league record than the golden generation. Madrid: European champions. It’s started to look obvious, feel inevitable, when it is not. After 1966, Madrid went 32 years without lifting the trophy that makes them. They won it again in 2000 and 2002, although from the seventh to the ninth, those were different looking teams and different eras, only Roberto Carlos, Raúl and Fernando Morientes starting all three finals, with Zidane scoring that iconic volley at the end of his debut season.

The galácticos had come, glory assured. But they got stuck. The 10th tortured them; the décima became an obsession and it resisted them for more than a decade. Six years in a row, they didn’t manage to win a knockout game. Twelve years they waited, which felt like an eternity, and eventually reached the final in 2014. With the clock on 92.48 they were losing, and to Atlético of all teams: that Sergio Ramos header is surely the single most sliding-doors moment in their history. “Every morning when he comes in, I feel like kissing him,” Paul Clement, Ancelotti’s assistant, said. The most traumatic of ends awaited them, everything about to be ripped up.

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Instead, it was the beginning. Madrid had the 10th. Two years later they had the 11th, then the 12th and the 13th in a row, which was extraordinary enough. That cycle appeared to be closing. Players went – Cristiano Ronaldo, Ramos, Gareth Bale, Casemiro, Raphaël Varane – and so did the coaches. Ancelotti had been sacked within a year and then Zidane – who had begun as his assistant and was now the competition’s most successful manager – departed.

Madrid were struggling to find a replacement. One day José Ángel Sánchez, the director general, received a call from Ancelotti about the possibility of Everton taking Madrid players on loan. At one point the Italian asked him how the search was going. Not good, he was told. To which Ancelotti joked, well, there is one obvious candidate, the best coach in the world.

Within a day it was done; within three years, Madrid lifted the decimocuarta and the decimoquinta, the best decade the biggest club of all have had, opening and closing with the competition’s most successful manager on the bench and four of its five most successful players on the pitch. The kid who had laid the first stone 20 years earlier provided the final touch, their work complete.