When the final whistle sounded at the Santiago Bernabéu, nobody cheered.
The only sound in the whole stadium came from one small corner of the upper tier, where a few thousand Liverpool fans in red had finally been allowed to breathe out. They sang. They roared. They had every right to.
Everywhere else, there was silence.
More than eighty thousand Madrid supporters sat frozen in their seats, staring at the scoreboard as though it might change if they looked enough.
Real Madrid 2–5 Liverpool.
Added to the 5–0 at Anfield, that made it ten goals to two.
Then, from somewhere high in the stands, a white handkerchief appeared.
Then another.
Then hundreds, then thousands, a ripple of white began sweeping around the old ground, accompanied by a long, rolling wave of whistles. It was the Bernabéu's oldest and cruellest tradition, the way the home crowd told its own team that it had gone too far.
The Madrid players saw all of it.
Marcelo walked off with his shirt pulled up over his face. Pepe stared straight ahead. Modrić, who had run himself into the ground all night, stood motionless near the centre circle with his hands on his hips, as if he had forgotten where the tunnel was.
And Casillas, the captain, a man who had lifted the Champions League trophy and carried Spain to a World Cup, stood on his own goal line for a long moment, looking down at the turf.
Ten goals.
In two matches.
Not even in his worst nightmares had he imagined a number like that.
On the other side of the pitch, the Liverpool players were already celebrating.
Pogba jumped on Suárez's back. Kroos was laughing in a rare sight. Čech, the oldest man on the pitch and the calmest, walked around slapping every teammate on the head like a proud father.
And in the middle of it all, Julien stood with his hands on his knees, catching his breath.
"Julien."
He looked up.
Raphaël Varane was walking toward him, shirt still on, face showing a strange expression. They had spent a summer together lifting the World Cup, and now one of them had just been dismantled by the other.
Varane stopped in front of him and shook his head slowly.
"Five goals, in two games," he said in French. "Against us. My own dear teammate."
Julien grinned. "Sorry."
"You are not sorry."
"A little bit sorry."
Varane groaned, then pulled him into a tight hug, thumping his back hard enough to hurt. "I will have to see your face at the next France camp. Everyone is going to laugh at me for a month."
"Only a month?"
"Idiot." Varane let go, laughing. "Please. Don't do that to us again."
"No promises," Julien said.
Varane pointed a finger at him, then gave up and walked away shaking his head.
Casillas was next.
The Madrid captain had walked over slowly, and when he reached Julien, he extended a hand. There was no bitterness in his face.
Julien shook his hand firmly. "It was an honour to play against you, Iker."
Casillas gave a small nod, then turned and walked off the pitch.
Julien watched him go. Then he felt someone standing a few steps away, and he turned his head.
Cristiano Ronaldo.
He had been standing there for a moment.
Ronaldo stepped forward and held out his hand. Julien took it and shook it.
"Good game," Ronaldo said in English.
"You too," Julien replied. "That goal in the first half was good."
"It was not enough."
"No," Julien agreed. "It wasn't."
Ronaldo's eyes didn't move from his. For a second it looked as if he might say more, but in the end he only let go of the hand and said, almost to himself,
"Next time will not be like this."
Then he turned and walked toward the tunnel without looking back.
Julien watched his back until it disappeared.
Next time?
He smiled slightly.
I'll be waiting.
Long after the stadium had emptied, the lights in the Real Madrid dressing room were still on.
The other players had showered and gone. A few had silently left through the back exit to avoid the cameras. Ancelotti was already in the press room.
Only one man remained.
Cristiano Ronaldo sat alone on the bench with a towel draped over his head and his elbows on his knees, his phone in his hand.
On the screen was a replay.
Ronaldo had been the best player in the world for years, together with that other man in Barcelona. For years, the argument had only ever been about the two of them.
Then the World Cup had come, and Julien had beaten Messi's Argentina on the biggest stage of all.
Ronaldo had looked at that result and thought, so that is how it ends for him.
And then, tonight, he had been the one on the wrong end of it. Ten goals in two matches. Booked for diving at Anfield. Shut down by a right-back almost nobody had heard of two years ago.
He turned off the screen.
The dressing room turned silent.
The world had barely finished watching the match before the headlines began.
By the time the Liverpool bus pulled away from the Bernabéu, every major sports outlet on the planet had already rewritten its front page.
In Spain, the tone was grief.
MARCA, in heavy black type: "The Biggest Humiliation in the History of the Club."
AS went straight for the number: "10–2. Shame."
Both papers argued that Madrid had been outplayed in every department, in both matches, home and away, and that no excuse could survive a scoreline like that. Double digits on aggregate against a single opponent was a black mark that would sit in the club's record books for as long as the club existed.
The English press, for its part, was really gentle about Madrid.
Sky Sports wrote that this was not a freak result or an off night, but a true measure of the gap between two teams, one at the very peak of its powers and the other, for now, nowhere near it.
The Times put it more bluntly: "Real Madrid did not lose to Liverpool. They were taken apart by them, twice."
Global media rushed out reports overnight.
None of them held back in condemning Real Madrid's collapse. The Galácticos once the terror of Europe, serial conquerors of the Champions League had fallen from their throne, and fallen hard.
Around the world the same word kept appearing, in every language.
Collapse.
It was the word of the hour for this Real Madrid side.
Under the weight of all that pressure, Real Madrid's manager Ancelotti faced the press after the match.
Unlike past post-defeat conferences, where regret was the furthest he'd go, this time Ancelotti took every ounce of blame on himself, his tone sincere as he owned the team's collapse.
He continued: "On paper, with the squad we have, we should have played a better match—we might even have had a chance to win. Our players have world-class individual ability. I simply failed to bring that out of them.
Liverpool's form and cohesion were far beyond ours. They deserved the blowout.
Every bit of this—the failure, the shame—rests on me. I need to go back and study this match properly, and face up to where this team truly stands right now."
Not once did he shift blame. Not once did he reach for an excuse. He admitted his own coaching failures, plainly, in full.
A reporter asked whether the squad itself was to blame.
Ancelotti shook his head.
"These are world-class players. If they did not perform, it is because I did not prepare them well enough. I have to go back, study this match, and understand where we really are."
He stood up and left without another word.
In a strange way, the Spanish press respected him more for it than for any victory. But the fans were never going to be so forgiving.
Within an hour, social media had found its favourite target for the night.
It was Kroos.
After the first leg, he had said in an interview that Liverpool was simply a higher-class club, and that joining them had been the best decision of his career. At the time, many Madrid fans had been furious. Disrespectful, they had called it.
Now the clip was back, and it was everywhere.
"Kroos called it weeks ago. Look at the scoreboard."
"He didn't leave Madrid. He escaped."
"I'm not even angry anymore. 10–2. Liverpool were always going to win this."
Even a few Madrid fans, with a sort of exhausted humour, joined in.
"At least we scored two."
"Don't. That's the part that hurts the most."
The Liverpool charter flight took off a little after two in the morning.
Inside, the mood was the opposite of Madrid's.
Pogba was in the aisle, loudly replaying his two assists for anyone who would listen. Coutinho and Sterling were arguing over who had run the most. Suárez had put on a pair of headphones and was grinning at nothing in particular. At the back, Čech had already fallen asleep in his seat, a blanket pulled up to his chin.
Klopp walked slowly down the aisle, a cup of coffee in his hand. He stopped beside Julien's seat.
"Mind if I sit?"
"Of course not, boss."
Klopp dropped into the empty seat and stretched out his legs. For a moment he said nothing, just looked out at the dark clouds below.
"Julien you scored ten goals," he said after a long wait. "Against Real Madrid."
"Yes."
"You know, when I came here, if someone had told me that, I would have laughed in their face."
Julien smiled. "I'd have laughed too."
Klopp turned to him, and the grin on his face faded into more serious.
"Listen to me, Julien. Tonight is very good. Tonight, you can enjoy. Sleep, eat, call your family." He tapped the armrest. "But on Monday morning, it is gone. All of it. Madrid, the headlines, the goals. We go back to Melwood, and it is just another day."
"I understand."
"I know you do." Klopp stood, clapped him on the shoulder, and added with a small smile, "That is why you are the one I worry about the least."
He walked on down the aisle.
Julien leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.
It was nearly five in the morning when he finally got home.
The house was dark and silent. He kicked off his shoes at the door, moved through the hallway without turning on the lights, and found a single lamp glowing in the living room.
Pauline was curled up on the sofa with a blanket over her legs, her phone on her chest. She had clearly tried to stay awake and lost.
He sat down beside her as gently as he could, but she stirred anyway.
"You're back," she murmured.
"I'm back."
She opened one eye. "Ten–two."
"Yes."
"Do you know how many messages I've had tonight? My phone has been buzzing for five hours. My mother called twice. Your mother called four times."
Julien laughed softly. "Four?"
"She wanted to know if you'd eaten."
"Of course she did."
Pauline pulled herself upright, rubbed her eyes, and looked at him properly for the first time. Under the lamp, his face was calm and a little tired, but there was no sign of the roaring, arms-wide figure the world had watched on television.
"You don't look like someone who just destroyed Real Madrid," she said.
"What does that look like?"
"Not like this."
He shrugged. "It's just a match."
"It's ten–two."
"It's two matches," he corrected.
She narrowed her eyes at him, then burst out laughing. "You are impossible."
He smiled and leaned back into the sofa.
For a few minutes, neither of them spoke.
Then Pauline picked her phone back up and scrolled for a moment.
"You know what they're saying?" she asked, trying to sound casual. "Everyone. Every newspaper, every pundit. They're saying this settles it."
"Settles what?"
She turned the screen toward him.
On it, a headline from one of the biggest sports sites in Europe, in capital letters:
"BALLON D'OR: IS THE RACE ALREADY OVER?"
Julien looked at it for a moment, then reached out and gently pushed the phone down.
"The year isn't finished,"
"Julien—"
"There's the league. The cups. The rest of the Champions League." He shook his head. "Nobody wins anything in November."
Pauline smiled and said nothing.
That was exactly what she had expected him to say.
Outside the window, the first grey light of morning had begun to creep over the rooftops of Liverpool.
In a few weeks, the shortlist would be announced.
By then, the whole world would be watching what this team did next. And somewhere out there, in a quiet room in Madrid, a man with a towel over his head was already waiting for his turn.
________________________________________________________
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