Real Madrid's Midfield Dilemma: The Thiago Pitarch Challenge

Real Madrid spent the summer staring at the same riddle: did this squad really have enough in midfield? The club answered it with actions, chasing Rodri and openly acknowledging the need for another piece in the engine room. When that move collapsed, they doubled down on what they had – and on Bernardo Silva, whose role in white has slid deeper and deeper from the free playmaker he once was at City into something closer to a central midfielder.

The season has barely started and the doubts are already back on the table.

Spanish newspaper AS underlined it, but the pitch told the story more brutally. Against Inter, Madrid never truly grabbed hold of the game. They chased, they reacted, they survived spells, yet they almost never dictated. Afterward, Fede Valverde admitted that José Mourinho had spent the match urging his players to keep the ball, to put a foot on it, to calm the tempo. The message was clear. The execution was not. The control he wanted simply never arrived.

This is not a new issue. It stretches back into last season, when the problem was patched rather than solved – and the patch had a name few expected.

Thiago Pitarch.

Then still officially a Castilla player, Pitarch forced his way into the first-team picture and stayed there. He didn’t just make up the numbers. He logged more than 800 minutes, started both legs against Manchester City in the Champions League round of 16 and took his place in the first leg of the quarter-final against Bayern. For a midfielder coming out of the reserves, it was a leap into the deep end. He swam.

This year, though, his role has slipped into a grey area.

A move away was on the table. Then an injury at the very start of pre-season shut the door. With no squad places free, Madrid registered him with the reserves, but kept him training and living as a first-team player. His new contract underlines that status. On paper, he belongs upstairs. On the pitch, his biggest challenge is far more basic: getting minutes.

The tactical board does him no favours. Mourinho has nailed his colours to a 4-2-3-1, and that system pins Pitarch to the double pivot. It is the most crowded room in the house. There he collides with Valverde, Aurélien Tchouaméni, Eduardo Camavinga and Bernardo Silva. Five men, two spots. On the depth chart, Thiago sits fifth.

What he does have is memory and personality. Memory of last season’s level, when the pressure and the shirt size didn’t seem to weigh him down. Personality in the way he took the ball in big Champions League nights as if they were just another Saturday. That fearlessness is his argument against the hierarchy.

Mourinho has barely used him of late, and the injury explains a lot of that. The Portuguese coach, though, has not forgotten what the youngster produced. Nor what he still thinks Pitarch can bring once he is fully up to speed.

“He is not a player to feature in the Castilla category, but rather a first-team player and I like him a lot,” Mourinho said, blunt as ever. “He has qualities that I like very much, and when he is fully fit he will be part of the group, and then there will be minutes waiting for him to play, as he has very high quality.”

There is a condition. Mourinho wants him sharper, stronger, built for the duels and distances his football demands, especially without the ball. The message has been direct, even teasing.

“The only thing I tell him is that his leg muscles are like mine, and he needs to add two kilograms there through work.”

It is part joke, part challenge. For Pitarch, it is also the doorway back into a midfield that Madrid never quite managed to fix in the market – and one that might yet need exactly the kind of player he proved he could be last spring.