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.

https://twitter.com/themadridzone/status/2052442550380658831?s=46

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.