Real Madrid’s goalkeeper leaps through the most significant moment in the club’s history. Take any photo, watch any video, and there he is, right in the middle of the most viewed and perhaps the most iconic image in their 116-year existence, the climax on a night of drama, suspense, nerves and then explosion, joy unbound. The long wait over, an obsession for more than a decade, there was glory at last.
For him, it was bloody awful — and they’re not slow to remind him of that. Sergio Ramos defeated him that day. Now Thibaut Courtois has to see him every day when he turns up at work. “They still joke about it,” he says.
On the night that Real Madrid won their 10th European Cup, Courtois was the Atletico Madrid goalkeeper, defeated as they took the decima. Of the Madrid team that night, Karim Benzema, Gareth Bale, Luka Modric, Raphael Varane, Isco and Dani Carvajal are still around, but it’s Ramos you have to look out for. Ramos you have to embrace too when you’re new at Valdebebas.
Not that they always beat him, and he could remind them of that. That season, he was a league champion — he has won the title as many times as any Real Madrid players have in the past five years — and the year before he won the Copa del Rey. Against Real Madrid. At the Santiago Bernabeu. It was one of the greatest moments in Atletico’s history: the first time they had beaten Real in 25 games and in the 21st century.
At the celebrations, Courtois stood on a balcony, thousands of supporters spread out below him, took the microphone and sang a rude song about what Real Madrid fans might do as their rivals celebrated.
“I was young and I got carried away with the moment,” he said when he joined Real Madrid this summer for €35 million. “I said sorry then and I say the same again; it’s not like me to do that.”
Courtois had long wanted a return to Madrid; his desire to move away from Chelsea and back to the Spanish capital had become an open secret. No one bothered to try to hide it anymore. “Everyone knew but we just couldn’t say so in the media,” he said. In fact, he had pretty well said so in the media too.
There were personal reasons — his kids and his former partner lived in the city — and professional ones too. Despite his past at Atletico, on the day of his presentation, he kissed the Real Madrid badge. “This is where I always wanted to be,” he said. He remembered having an Iker Casillas shirt when he was little; he had probably acquired it after Madrid had played at Anderlecht, if memory serves, he said. His time at Atletico had been good. He had been there on loan for three years — and he was the one who made it that long, twice insisting on staying in Spain when Chelsea wanted him to return to England — but he was here now.
That past was swiftly left behind. Outside, at least. It could have been difficult to turn up with Keylor Navas around too. For three years, Madrid had tried to replace the Costa Rican; for three years, he had resisted, winning the Champions League. Zinedine Zidane had defended him, but Zidane was now gone. The dressing room admired him still, although the club had assumed that, signing made, he would be likely to depart. “I have the same desire to die as I do to leave the Bernabeu,” Navas said. So he stayed.
Madrid had two goalkeepers, both of whom wanted to start; they would compete. At every news conference, Julen Lopetegui was asked. The questions got reframed and asked over again — with the wording changing, but not the answer: “This is more normal inside than you seem to want to see it from the outside; things are simpler at professional level than is often sold.” Far from a problem, he kept saying, what he has is “two magnificent solutions.”