Topic: Real Madrid

However much authority the José Mourinho that walked into the press conference on that warm July day in 2004 could mobilize, the one that walked out was one of rare, maybe unsurpassed authority who had literally seduced most of the press pack. Thereafter, The Special One would have his Anglophone audience largely eating out of his hand for the remainder of his three-and-a-bit years in charge at Chelsea.

The importance we onlookers attach to a game of football is not a default property of that game. Even for the participants, it is important to them because they have willed it to be so. It's a fiction, and when we buy into it we are suspending disbelief. Sports fans are serial self-deluders.

Whereas most clubs are scruffy hamlets hoping the world hasn't forgotten them completely, Real Madrid and Barcelona are empires. They are masters of self-aggrandisement, all royal flash and ermine undergarments. When two great pomposities meet, the results are spectacular and inevitable, in the same way the dying sun swallowing the Earth will be spectacular and inevitable, except that we get to witness this particular supernova via television and web streams of dubious legality.