Football is a team game. There are only 11 slots for you to fill up. The scouts spend their 24×7 to find the best options and the team management does their best to find the perfect player for each slot. Depending upon the player’s qualities, skills, freedom of movement, playing style, and (obviously) the choice of the manager, a player take a certain place in a field. Some stick to their position from A-Z of their career whereas some evolve. A football field can be divided into many segments depending upon the coaches’ ideology. Some are very strict on their zones (Like Guardiola) whereas some are a little more labile. Depending upon their thinking they may tell a defender to be a midfielder or a midfielder to drop more. A pure number nine can be false nine, a right-back can be wing-back, etc. Whatever happens, the coaches generally do not shift the players from the right side to the left or vice-versa (except the players have the prospect of giving special impact and definitely, if they cope up).
As 4-3-3 and 4-4-2 were the prominent formations used between 2013/14 to 2020/21, the players who suit better on the left side played on the left and the same happened on the right side too. But unfortunately, the right-side players could not resonate with their potentials in the field like their complimentary side. If we look at the stats, we will notice that the players on the right side could not make themselves available and, even when available, could not execute their potentials.
If we take our two full-backs into account, we can see that Marcelo and Carvajal are bearing the weight for a lot of years. From 13/14 to 19/20, Marcelo played almost 23 thousand minutes plus whereas Carvajal could play 22 thousand minutes.
Though this difference is not too much, we need to keep in mind that Marcelo was given rest or sidelined because of his defending issues sometimes. Coaches brought Nacho or Coentrao when they wanted to bring more defensive solidity. Even in this season, we have four good options—Miguel, Nacho, Alaba, Mendy—to fill in the boots of Marcelo, and Carlo is using them. On the other hand, without a brief period of Arbeloa, there was no big competitor of Carvajal. The fitness status of Carvajal is so bitter that, in last season, Zizou was almost dependent upon Lucas Vasquez to cover that. The premature leave of Carvajal in two UCL finals are well known to all. He has renewed until 2025 whereas Marcelo will leave after this season; which means Board is trying to trust his boots more.
On the attacking trident, we had BBC, Bale, Benzema, and Cristiano. If we check the stat of CR7 between 2013/14 to 2017/18, we will find his almost 20k minutes of game time (19597 minutes actually) with a gargantuan figure of 240 goals. In the same period, Bale was fielded for 13245 minutes while he scored 84 goals. The causes of Bale’s absence and blunt attack are something ‘pain in the ass’ thing hence those are not going to be described more.
To fill the void of Cristiano Ronaldo we brought Eden Hazard. But his story is totally bizarre. Taking himself as a sporadic visitor of Bernabéu (or Di Stefano), we can have Vinicius Junior as our main left-winger and Marco Asensio as our right-winger. If we take the game time and scoring capability in our analysis, we will see that Vinicius played 6280 minutes between 2018/19 to 2020/21 whereas Marco Asensio played 5337 minutes. In this time Vinicius scored 15 goals and Asensio scored 16. We need to take in mind that Vinicius was almost an SOS by Solari in the main team whereas Asensio already played five seasons in La Liga by 2018.
The absence of these prime players or their less prolificacy made the team more left-oriented. In Carlo’s first and Zidane’s tenures, Madrid was almost dependent upon their left side to win the match. It was completely the Coaches’ brilliance, the merit of other players, and definitely our luck that we did not suffer much. But, as the problem is not going to be resolved on its own, and especially, we are suffering the absence of a proper right back in our already crumble and incoherent backline, we need a strong backup ASAP.
In a less magnified observation, the main cause of this blunt right side is injury. And, there is no causality between being right-sided and injury proneness. It was a complete misfortune for these players. But their absence forced the teams and coaches to suffer. What if, they all were ok during 2020-21? Could Zidane bring back-to-back La Liga? Would it let him keep his seat? Who knows!
