It was Benzema

Football is the most popular sport in the world because a shy eight-year-old boy, a member of a large family of Algerian immigrants who lives in social housing on the outskirts of Lyon and has just been rejected by his neighborhood club for being short and chubby and clumsy, needs two trees to be Ballon d'Or. Two trees in a wasteland, one separated from the other at enough distance to be considered goal posts. Two friends, one centering from the right and one from the left, in the rain and cold, in the extreme heat of summer. And many hours, enough to forget to eat, enough to escape through the window of the house with the ball under his arm.

Memory retains that of the past that interests it to preserve the present. In Benzema par Karim, a documentary about the Frenchman in Madrid, the star stops with his sports car in front of that wasteland, where the trees still are, and says that if he still scores goals today it is thanks to them. It is curious that his career at Real has followed the same steps as his career since childhood: a player always one of the best but not the best, suspicious, misunderstood, indolent, at times discreet and others disconnected, sometimes even conflictive, on the wire until emerging in extreme situations for him and causing a Big Bang spreading a scandalous and happy game, Plethoric, which shakes rivals like a mat.

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There is, however, no such change, or at least such a grotesque change. What happens is that tired of others not translating his football, he translates it himself to make it easy for the tribune fan or the desperate press, and then he wins by unanimity what he had already won in private in the eyes of his teammates, his coaches or the less agitated public; He brings his galaxy closer to ours, he shows it, but the result is always the same: Benzema has always scored goals, he has always given assists, he never lost elegance or personality, he always did everything he touched on the field better, starting with Real Madrid. It made us madridistas better, more knowledgeable and less angry, it made us happier, and it turned a few years, Benzema's years at Madrid, into a time, the happiest we have ever seen.

It was Zidane if Zidane had played all his life at the Bernabeu; it was Ronaldo if Ronaldo had arrived at the age of 21 in Madrid. He leaves forever plays and goals, works of art that do not overlap his status as a striker of another century: fast when it seems that he does not advance, violent shooting when it seems that he places it meekly, with the game in his head when he looks at the ground disconnected, sniffing the weakest defender and the goalkeeper who best disguises fear when he has his back to them, lethal in the area when the laces are being tied. He leaves without sitting on the bench and only a year after Benzema's life's work, Benzema's Champions League, a continent subject to fire and destruction by a man who finds his destiny at the end of his career, when his entire generation is back or resting in Arabia, Japan and the United States. That's when Benzema passes the bill and demands a tip at the top of the elite. Plugged in, overflowing, unleashed.

I've been watching him play for 14 years and writing about him when he played, which he played a lot. And the best memory I take away is not his game, but a gesture: the smile at the Etihad Stadium that the cameras capture when City put the fourth to Madrid in the semifinals of the Champions League 2022. That smile is a sentimental demonstration of madridismo. It is an ironic smile that seems to say "we have already put two, we will have to put another"; It is a smile that angers the fans who are watching it and who have to wait for Panenka a few minutes later to understand it, and the 120 minutes of the following week to admire it, as always happens with him. It is the smile of "everything is fine, destiny is written, we won this European Cup when I went to ask Donnarumma the time". That fatal smile, pure poison for City, was Benzema in Madrid: a dance that never ends, an unalterable memory, a party of etiquette in which those who make us happier are, always, fat and short and clumsy children who will never be lumberjacks, they will always be trees.

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