Bouquets
So just how many medals has Sergio Ramos won? Well, he actually started his collection off very slowly. No titles had been won during his couple of years in the Sevilla senior squad, even if they won the UEFA Cup the year he left, and his arrival in the capital in the summer of 2005 coincided with a barren spell for Real Madrid – although his backers will point out that this correlation does not necessarily imply causation. He didn’t even reach a Champions League quarter-final until 2011, while it took until the end of the 2006/07 season for him to claim his first professional honour.
That was the LaLiga title, and it was quickly followed by another the following season. Then, Ramos tasted his first international success, playing at right-back as Spain won Euro 2008, amazingly so given the difficult qualifying campaign they’d been through on their way to the tournament. Although he’d experience a major trophy drought at club level over the next two years, as a result of Pep Guardiola’s all-conquering Barcelona side, Ramos was soon lifting the World Cup trophy in South Africa, the pinnacle of any player’s career.
Yet the centre-back was still only just getting started and racked up title after title over the following few seasons, first when José Mourinho brought some degree of success back to the Bernabéu and then when he played such a decisive role in Real Madrid’s four Champions League trophies in five seasons, including the unprecedented third in a row of the title in May 2018. “It’s taken me 10 years, but here it is,” he said as he kissed his first Champions League medal in the dressing room in Lisbon, unaware that a feast was to follow the famine.
In total, he’s now won 22 titles and he has so many medals and miniature trophies that he has some of the former hanging on the latter in his trophy room at home. One trophy which is not in his personal trophy room or in Real Madrid’s equivalent is the 2011 Copa del Rey, which he famously dropped in front of the team bus when the driver braked suddenly and which is now smashed up and on show at the Spanish FA’s football museum in Madrid – much to Real Madrid’s displeasure. Symbolically, it’s almost as if he has so many trophies to his name that he can afford to toss some of them away.
Brickbats
In the final moments of Real Madrid’s 3-0 victory over Deportivo in the opening weekend of the 2017/18 LaLiga season, Ramos was judged to have dangerously elbowed Borja Valle, earning a second booking after previously being shown yellow for a nasty slapping match with Fabian Schär.
This was the centre-back’s 23rd red card of his professional career and his 18th in LaLiga, equalling the precedents of Pablo Alfaro and of Aguado. There could even have been more, had fewer referees swallowed their whistle at sharp-elbowed tussles over the years. From the red cards he received in his third and fifth Real Madrid appearances to this one in Galicia, it had become something of a joke for football fans across the globe, even if it was a serious matter from the point of view of the player and of his many frustrated coaches, especially as he has been sent off in five separate Clásicos, only one of which ended in a victory.
However, there were rarely any truly horrible leg-crunching challenges and, more often than not, he was sent off for second yellows; only seven of his dismissals were straight reds. From shouting at referees to unnecessary squabbles with the opposition, so many of Ramos’ bookings have been silly ones, making him the kind of toerag who annoys the punditocracy the most. Many of them have also been the result of bad tackles – not in a dangerous sense, but in a technically poor sense – and that is yet another reason why Ramos’ legacy will not be his defending.
Following the 2014 Champions League victory, he endured two of his worst seasons in a white shirt, made all the more awkward due to his messy contract renewal and the fact he was now the Real Madrid captain and the man supposed to lead by example. A persistent shoulder injury had significantly hampered the Andalusian’s performance levels, but two unhelpful dismissals towards the business end of the 2015/16 season did little to earn him any sympathy from the Bernabéu crowd.
It’s a good thing, then, that he helped the club to win another Champions League title at the very end of that campaign, burying the fans’ exasperation at his ability to consistently leave his team a man short. He’s lucky that he’s been able to staple success on top of a disciplinary record which looks like Royal Dutch Shell’s logo, because the statue honouring his career would otherwise have had to stand a couple of feet from a card-brandishing referee.