Welcome to The Daily Merengue \u2014 a place where you can feel free to discuss all things football. Do not be alarmed by the overt RMCF bias. It\u2019s in the name!<\/p>\n
Shoutout to the Mods who do a fantastic job, Valyrian Steel, Ezek XI, KungFuZizou, NeRObutBlanco, Felipejack, and Juninho.<\/p>\n
Writer\u2019s Prelude. This week will be on the lighter side (assuming nothing crazy happens) because I don\u2019t fully have much time and also it\u2019s about time we all take a mini break from football. It\u2019s going to be a long long season.<\/p>\n
This week will also hopefully feature a few DTs written by your fellow MMers. Again please email us at managingmadridmods@gmail.com if you\u2019d like to contribute to this week.<\/p>\n
Congratulations. First \u2013 congratulations to the Spanish National Team on winning the 2026 World Cup and congratulations to all MMers who support Spain. Also congrats to Cucurella our new Real Madrid LB. The national team had an impressive campaig with only conceding one goal the entire tournament and truly banding as a collective to win another international trophy. This young and connected team will continue to grow and be a true power house in sport as long as they can rely on De La Fuente, Yamal, and Cubarsi (mixed with some of the young upcomers like Dean \/ GG \/ Nico Williams \/ Pubill).<\/p>\n
Rodri. I\u2019m just going to be brief \u2013 there is legitimately no proper footballing reasons for Real Madrid Club de Futbol to not sign Rodrigo Hernandez Cascante aka Rodri. There really isn\u2019t at this point and if you\u2019re completely against this signing, I\u2019m going to have to see a 500-word essay to prove that you\u2019re not just a hater because of the Balon D\u2019Or controversy.<\/p>\n
Rodri is as close to being a slam dunk signing as we can possibly make. Yes, he\u2019s 30. Yes, he\u2019s faced recent injuries. And yes, he may have lost a step or two physically. Nevertheless, everything about his skillset is what our midfield is missing. In my honest opinion, Rodri is the only midfielder that Perez can drop into our squad and immediately fix our issues. And this isn\u2019t just come from WC-hype\u2026I\u2019ve firmly believed this for months now. Our fellow MMer conq has shouted this for months now. Vitinha \/ Joao Neves would be great additions but they don\u2019t fix our midfield the way that Rodri immediately would. And MM lets be clear a midfield is first and foremost a balance of profiles and then a product of individual talent. Rodri is masterfully adept at evading pressure and controlling the game. He understands build-up tempo. He can pick a cross field pass to our wings with relative ease. He isn\u2019t the most athletic deep lying playmaker but he also understands simple positioning so that he isn\u2019t completely out of place during transition and equally important he picks and chooses when to escape yellows with technical fouls. Rodri paired with Tchouameni and to a lesser extent Fede Valverde, both players who can support him defensively and be the legs that he may need, would do absolute wonders for our team. No longer would we need Arda Guler to drop deep in order to pick up the ball from our CBs. Dean who often was forced to adopt the backline creative impetus of our team would finally have someone in the midfield to actually pair with. And who knows maybe Rodri can teach our young midfielders a thing or two?!<\/p>\n
If your only fear is that Rodri is injury prone and on his last legs, that\u2019s an honest fear but in a market where Tonali is going for 100M, Rodri is likely a worthwhile risk. We can look at market values and drop our favorite DLP names but many of them simply are impossibly expensive or frighteningly young. Bouaddi had a good tournament and is now being valued near 100M by Lille. In many ways, he\u2019s more Camavinga than Toni Kroos and likely is far too young and inexperienced to take a commanding role in our midfield. He also just doesn\u2019t actually control play. If you watch closely, that just isn\u2019t his game especially in a progressive sense. Vitinha isn\u2019t leaving PSG any time soon and seemed to struggle outside of Luis Enrique\u2019s PSG system. Joao Neves faces a similar dilemma and again isn\u2019t a controller. Adam Wharton can play a pass or two but won\u2019t lead our midfield that simply isn\u2019t his skillset or his demeanor. Kees Smit \u2013 tbh people don\u2019t even mention Kees Smit anymore\u2026<\/p>\n
So yes Florentino Perez \u2014 put your pride aside and spend 50M on Rodri. Yes it\u2019s a temporary fix, but we\u2019ve gone trophyless for two seasons now. I\u2019m not entirely sure that you\u2019d survive a third. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome to The Daily Merengue \u2014 a place where you can feel free to discuss all things football.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57899,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2039,82],"class_list":["post-57898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-madrid","tag-general","tag-madrid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}