The ONLY Thing More BROKEN Than Real Madrid’s TEAM SPIRIT Is News Aggregators’ CAPS LOCK BUTTON

Days before the second Clásico of the La Liga season, the Real Madrid locker room is reportedly falling apart. Courtesy of a running faucet of leaks that has been spraying since early on Thursday, it is clear that the club is suffering from some kind of internal civil war. The matter truly came to a head, so to speak, in the form of a physical confrontation between midfielders Aurélien Tchouaméni and Federico Valverde, the result of which sent Valverde to the hospital to be treated for a head injury. Beyond the pretty well-established broad outline of the situation, though, specifics and clarity have been hard to come by. And so anyone searching for more details from the assortment of reports coming out all over the Spanish media must venture in the land of soccer news aggregators, where EMPHASIS is KING and PEOPLE are FORGETTING THINGS all the time.

Now, just because these kinds of aggregators are not themselves the most trustworthy sources of information, that doesn't mean there's no fire underneath all the smoke. As evidenced by the various sources cited by both Madrid Zone and Madrid Xtra, the two primary English-language aggregators of Real Madrid news, these reports do come from somewhere. Aggregators don't exactly make things up, but rather they are usually happy to post any and all truths, half-truths, and baseless speculation, so long as it emerges first from someone in the notoriously inconsistent and unreliable soccer media industrial complex. This makes for a hallucinogenic experience when something like "Two Real Madrid players might have had a fistfight that left one with TEMPORARY AMNESIA" comes into play. It was evident from the start that something had happened between Tchouaméni and Valverde, a fact that was confirmed by an official statement from the club late on Thursday, but it was also evident that most of the reporting that would come out about it would be contradictory, speculative, and incomplete.

What these aggregator accounts argue by their very existence is: What if that didn't matter? And also, what if we invented a new way of post formatting that was designated to entertain and bewilder more than inform? That's how you end up with this ...

... and this ...

... and, my god, this:

The reports become the story, more so than the actual news itself. Put another way, the slow trickling of news from every angle, all gathering at the same place, intensifies and amplifies the drama involved in any story, and it becomes all about waiting for the next explosion rather than trying to sort out what actually happened.

So what did actually happen? Parsing through the many reports, it seems there were a series of training-ground incidents this week, in which Valverde and Tchouaméni traded too-harsh tackles on each other, which is itself the most bog-standard kind of internal dust-up. The latest incident came Thursday, when Valverde reportedly lunged in hard on Tchouaméni. That turned into an argument that wasn't resolved by the time the players were back in the dressing room. There, Valverde apparently insulted Tchouaméni, and a physical altercation followed. Whether Tchouaméni then landed a punch that knocked Valverde out or not is in dispute, both by unnamed sources and by Valverde himself, who said in a statement that he "accidentally" hit a table. How? Who knows? Who cares? This is gold!

(Not even Valverde is disputing that he had to go to the hospital, which means that "FORGETTING THINGS" might end up being actually true!)

What is definitively not in dispute, though, is that there is something rotten in Madrid. With the club at the tail end of a trophy-less season, tensions were always going to be high, thanks to the incredible pressure that comes with playing for Real Madrid. The fact that the trophies were lost early and, in the case of the club's Copa del Rey exit to second division Albacete, embarrassingly only makes everything worse. Add in a midseason player mutiny that saw them successfully overthrow one manager, and reports of growing divisions in the locker room about things like divergent manager loyalties and struggles for supremacy in the locker room hierarchy, and it all makes for a fine recipe for the current chaos.

On the manager loyalty angle, another wave of reports indicate that Tchouaméni was on the side of Xabi Alonso, Madrid's first manager this season who was fired in January after poor results and whispers of dressing room discontent. Valverde, on the other end, is reported to have been against Alonso and was instead part of a group of players who would ignore and mock the former Madrid midfielder, which ultimately made the highly regarded young coach's position untenable. That split could go a long way towards explaining the underlying tensions that have to exist for something like a rough tackle to devolve into a melee ... if that is what actually happened, of course.

When it comes to the current Real Madrid manager, Álvaro Arbeloa is not safe from the aggregator news this week, either.

Players allegedly calling Arbeloa "cono" or "traffic cone" (while COVERING their MOUTHS, of course) is steeped in some deep lore that circles back to this weekend's Clásico: Former Barcelona center back/shit-stirrer-in-chief Gerard Piqué once called club rival but national team colleague Arbeloa not a friend but a "cono-cido," or acquaintance, emphasizing the "cono" as a sly nod to the disparaging nickname Barça fans had given Arbeloa as a reflection of his not-so-formidable defensive capabilities. (Back in the days of the Messi-Ronaldo era Clásicos, Barcelona and Real Madrid players truly hated each other's guts, and these two were among the main antagonists.)

So, Real Madrid players referencing a Barcelona player's meme about their current manager is not what you could call "good" for Arbeloa's job prospects, on top of everything else going wrong this week. I haven't even gotten into the fact that Antonio Rüdiger slapped Álvaro Carreras, something that was actually confirmed! Or that Kylian Mbappé is having his own stand-off with the club through the press! Actually, let's get into that real quick, because this is an incredible video of Mbappé cracking up while driving out of training on Thursday:

It is impossible to keep up with every detail of the mess in Madrid, and doubly so if trying to receive the news via aggregator accounts that post contradicting statements left and right. The whole deal does, however, make for great entertainment, aided by both Zone and Xtra going above and beyond to make this all sound as ludicrous as possible. Soccer news is already difficult to take seriously given how much misinformation there is; adding in an extra layer of bullshit on top of that makes it downright impossible. Is that a bad thing? Probably, but damn if it isn't fun. I know that I will remember "He was FORGETTING THINGS" for a long time, probably longer than I will remember the vague details of the incident that spurred it in the first place, and isn't that what it's all about?