At the end of Aitor Karanka’s debut at the Santiago Bernabéu, he bounded up the stairs four at a time and into the dressing room, where he found the Spanish Super Cup in the middle of the floor. His opening night had delivered a 4-1 destruction of Barcelona, a perfect introduction to football’s greatest rivalry, and his first trophy. This was huge, or so he thought. His new teammates, though, had just left the cup there and headed for a shower. “That day, I realised what Real Madrid is,” he says.
It was 1997, he had been there only a week but already saw that the demands were relentless. Karanka was reminded of that repeatedly as a player who won everything and later as a coach during the clásico’s peak, when “the world stopped to watch”. That day he recalls: “I stood looking at the trophy, at them. It was like: ‘OK, good, but what really matters is the other one.’” Soon he had that too, Madrid claiming the European Cup after 32 years. “Manolo Sanchís held on to it like a child. Tears in his eyes, he said: ‘One day you’ll realise how hard this is, what it means.’”
