Real Madrid manager Alvaro Arbeloa has directed his sharpest words not at Federico Valverde or Aurelien Tchouameni for their training ground fight, but at whoever leaked the story to the press within hours of it happening. Speaking ahead of Sunday’s Clasico against Barcelona, Arbeloa described the leak as the most painful aspect of the entire episode and called it a betrayal of the club’s badge.
Arbeloa was notably measured in his assessment of Valverde and Tchouameni themselves, praising both players for their professionalism and the manner in which they handled the aftermath. It was the person who took the story outside the dressing room that drew his real anger.
“What happens in the Real Madrid dressing room should stay in the Real Madrid dressing room, and that is what hurts me the most,” he said. “These situations have always happened, but I am not justifying it in any way. It was an incident, and we were unlucky that Fede ended up with a cut. It has more to do with bad luck than what actually happened. They have apologised, and from here on out we need to focus on the game.”
He went further in expressing how seriously he views the breach of trust. “Leaking things that happen in the dressing room seems to me a betrayal and disloyalty to this badge,” Arbeloa said, adding that he has experienced far worse incidents during his own playing career without them ever reaching the public domain. “I have had a teammate who grabbed a golf club and hit another player with it,” he said, using the example to illustrate that such incidents are not unusual in football dressing rooms.
Asked whether he had any idea who might have been responsible for the leak, Arbeloa was blunt. “No, I do not work for the CIA and I am not accusing the players. There are many people involved with Real Madrid. What happens with my players will remain between them and me, and we have to set an example.”
The Madrid press reported the day after the incident that the club had begun an internal search for the source of the leak. Arbeloa’s comments suggest that search is ongoing, though he was careful not to point fingers at any specific individual or group within the club’s extensive backroom operation.
The Valverde-Tchouameni incident is not the only internal conflict to have entered the public domain at Real Madrid in recent days. Altercations between Alvaro Carreras and Antonio Rudiger have also been reported, as has widespread discontent surrounding Kylian Mbappe’s relationship with the club.
Arbeloa had addressed dressing room privacy as recently as the previous week, when he responded to reports of a breakdown in communication between himself and Dani Ceballos by insisting that internal matters should remain internal. The fact that yet another incident became public knowledge days later will have done nothing to ease his frustration.
The irony of the situation is not lost. A squad mired in division and distrust now has one shared mission that cuts across all the other tensions: finding the person responsible for exposing those tensions to the world. Whether that search will unite or further divide a fractured dressing room ahead of the biggest match of their season remains to be seen.
