Dani Carvajal laid the first stone and applied the final brush stroke. In May 2004, when he was a 12-year-old kid with floppy blond hair and a lifetime before him, he placed Real Madrid’s white shirt into the foundations of their training ground, a new home for an institution that, the legend carved into that granite slab said, “respects its past, learns from its present and believes in its future”. On the first day of June 2024, now a 32-year-old man with a greying beard and a history behind him, he was in Madrid colours at Wembley, leaping to head in the goal that helped secure their greatest work of all.
Twenty years had passed almost to the day, and it was done. How much longer before anyone witnesses this again, if they do? That day Carvajal, an infantil in the academy, stood alongside a 77-year-old Alfredo Di Stéfano, the most significant player whom club football has had, a symbol of their everything; the man whose arrival in 1953 changed Madrid and the game for ever, forging their legend, an identity. Now, when it comes to the European Cup, the competition in which they did it and feel as their own, Carvajal stands above him. Even saying it sounds absurd, a glimpse of what has just happened.
