No ifs, no buts, this Real Madrid rank alongside Di Stéfano’s as greatest team ever | Sid lowe
Six European Cups in a decade is an achievement to match any, even that one from 1956-1960, untouchable in black and white
Dani Carvajal laid the first stone and applied the final brush stroke. In May 2004, 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, a 32-year-old man with a greying beard and a history behind him, he wore it at Wembley, leaping to head in the goal that completed 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 Caravajal, an infantil in the academy, stood alongside a 78-year-old Alfredo Di Stéfano, the most significant player 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.
