The 63rd-Minute Red Card and the Forty-Page Notebook: The Truth Behind the Madrid Derby

In the 63rd minute at the Metropolitano, when referee Ortiz Arias raised the red card in front of Dean Huijsen, the stands split into two halves of sound. One half roared. The other fell so silent that I could hear the young Real Madrid defender's studs scraping the grass as he turned and walked toward the touchline. Standing in the technical area, I saw the right hand of assistant referee Trujillo Suárez — the VAR official — rest lightly on the edge of his headset, and I knew the decision had been sealed before the stands understood what was happening. In my forty-page notebook, that day's page held only one line, written at 9:47 p.m.: "Huijsen — tackle from behind — no contact with ball — straight red — penalty to Atlético." Not a single adjective. Not a single judgment. People watch the goals; I watch the space behind the right back — and this time, that space was the one a twenty-year-old left behind when he walked off the pitch. The final score: Atlético Madrid 2–1 Real Madrid. A result eleven thousand people will retell in eleven thousand different ways over the coming week. But the forty-page notebook never lies. And it recorded exactly what happened — no more. The Madrid derby is always the kind of match in which the scoreboard lies more than in any other La Liga fixture. Here, what is measured is not only goals but rhythm of possession, number of tactical fouls, meters run off the ball and — most importantly — administrative decisions. A red card in the 63rd minute completely reshapes the spatial structure of both teams for the remaining thirty. Real Madrid lose a man, are forced to drop their block lower, push their midfield deeper, and leave an enormous stretch of open ground between the 18-yard box and the center circle. Atlético need only feed the ball into that space — and they did so with a patience bordering on cruelty. Before the red card, Real Madrid controlled 58% of possession, with Jude Bellingham and Federico Valverde alternating to carry the ball from the second line to the third. That structure worked smoothly for the first forty minutes. But once Huijsen left the pitch, Real's possession share dropped to 44% across the remaining second half, and their passes into the final third fell by nearly half. These are numbers no stadium sees, yet they explain precisely why Atlético scored their second goal in the 79th minute. I stayed at the stadium for two more hours after the final whistle, following a habit I developed over a career spent trailing teams from the training ground to the dressing room. By the time the stands went dark and the young reporters had run off to chase reactions on social media, I was still there — and what I saw was not in the replays. It was in how Real Madrid reorganized their back line in the seven minutes after going a man down, in how Antonio Rüdiger repeatedly clapped to keep his teammates' distances, in how a young player like Lee Kang-in covered a gap he was never trained to cover. The training ground has no spectators, but every answer lives there. And this derby was no exception. What mattered more came in the post-match press conference. A manager walked into the room with a stack of printed color photos in his hands — images of challenges, of players' body positions, of red circles drawn around an opponent's leg. He laid them on the table, arranged them in a row, and began to speak. This is the kind of media behavior I have witnessed many times, but at a Madrid derby its ripple effect is far greater than at an ordinary cup qualifier. In the sports industry, there is an unwritten rule: when a manager brings props to a press conference, it signals he prepared for a media battle in advance, not that he reacted in the heat of the moment. A stack of printed color photos is not the product of a sleepless night. It is the product of a video-analysis department working since the day before. That says a great deal about how a club allocates its human — and media — capital during a match week. I make this assessment based on my experience following matches and press conferences across many seasons: what ends up on the table in the press room was usually decided long before. And when the content of a press conference revolves around referees, people are usually talking about something else — the instability of a defense, a lost match rhythm, or a tactical plan that failed to work as designed. This is where I always want to pause, because it is precisely the "court of data" I try to build in every piece I write. A manager saying "we were treated unfairly" is a statement. A match with four fouls in the central defensive zone, three of them within 25 meters of goal, is a fact. When you place them side by side, they tell two different stories. Look at the match's heat map. In the first twenty minutes after going a man down, Real Madrid defended with a four-man back line but only three midfielders genuinely participating in recovery runs. This created an open zone some fifteen meters wide on the left flank, where the fullback was forced to choose between two equally bad options: push wide to press the ball and leave the central channel to the opposing midfielder, or tuck inside to plug the middle and give the opponent room to cross. Atlético did not need to be brilliant to exploit that space. They only needed enough patience to wait for teammates to take their positions. And they waited correctly. What most television viewers do not see is this: in the first seventy minutes, before the red card, Real Madrid had lost the ball three times in their own half — not because of VAR, not because of the referee, but because they played passes into pressure zones without an escape option. My notebook recorded those three situations with the same mark: a small cross at the edge of the page. It is the mark I use for errors no scoreboard punishes, but which every tactical plan must pay for. When everyone watches the ball, I only see the directing hand from the touchline. Atlético's head coach stood for the final thirty minutes, never once sitting down. He did not shout. He simply raised a hand, moved a finger, pointed at a specific space his players needed to occupy. All three of Real's conceded chances in that period — including the goal later disallowed by VAR against Osasuna — originated in spaces that the analytical staff had circled on the tactics board before kickoff. There is another notable detail. Referee Ortiz Arias is forty-one this year. He is assigned mainly to matches of modest stature — information I noted in my book during preseason, when I followed La Liga's referee assignment lists. That a referee without extensive experience at the top level was placed in a situation requiring a direct red-card decision in a Madrid derby — before sixty thousand fans, with pressure from both technical areas — is not the personal problem of Ortiz Arias. It is a resource-allocation problem within the system itself. And this, I believe, is the point people are badly misreading. The Negreira affair, the faint shadow of a past refereeing scandal in Spanish football, has been dragged back into this debate. That was a poor media move, and equally poor analytically. When you attach a wrong call — right or wrong on the merits — to a systemic scandal that existed years earlier, you fix nothing within that system. You only make it more wary of the press, more closed in its decision-making, and slower to publish the audio of communications between the on-field referee and VAR. What is more concerning is that for fans, a story about referees is often easier to digest than a story about their own team's defense playing poorly during the fifteen most important minutes of the match. But here, the truth lies on the second side. And that truth is not being told. In the dressing room after the match, I managed only about twenty minutes before the media department asked reporters to leave the area. Those twenty minutes were enough for me to see Rüdiger sitting silently in a corner, his head wrap still on, his gaze fixed on some undefined point on the floor. One of the younger players walked past and placed a hand on his shoulder. No one said anything. This is the kind of detail a piece about referees would never find room for, but a piece about people would. There is something about derby red cards: they do not just change the course of one match. They also push managers into a defensive media posture that lasts for weeks. In the days that follow, every pre-match press conference will open with a question about referees. That changes how a club prepares for its next game — not tactically, but psychologically. And in a season where every point is worth its weight in silver, that is a genuine loss. People often ask me, after forty-three years in this industry, what the biggest lesson is. I always give the same answer: never let a match be retold through a single moment. This derby is not the story of a red card. It is the story of how one team lost a man and lost its structure, while the other lost a man and found a new plan. It is the story of spaces never recorded by the scoreboard, of players who did not score but ran perfectly, of a moment before the ball hit the net that no one noticed. And that is why I always carry my forty-page notebook to the stadium, even to matches I know will not yield a single worthwhile piece. The notebook does not record my emotions. It records the truth the scoreboard does not want to tell. And here, that truth is this: Real Madrid did not lose because of a decision. They lost because of twenty minutes in which they could not rebuild their structure after losing a man, and because of a midfield without enough options to hold the ball under pressure in their own half. Dragging this story toward the referees — even with printed photos placed on the press-conference table, even with declarations of injustice — does not make the team stronger in the next round. It only distracts fans from what truly decides results. Next week, I will again be at one of the two teams' training grounds, very early, before the media arrive and before the official press conferences begin. I want to see how Real Madrid's defenders train for shorthanded defensive situations. I want to see whether they adjust the distance between the two center-backs and the fullback, or whether they simply dump the work onto young players. I want to see whether anyone there, in the spectator-free silence, recognizes what my notebook already recorded. The training ground has no spectators, but every answer lives there. And I will be there to record them. When the red card went up, there was a small thing no one noticed. Before Huijsen walked off, a midfielder spoke to him in a calm voice, hand on his back. In my notebook, I did not record the content of that sentence, because I only heard the beginning through the crowd noise, and as a friend of more than a few players' families, I know I am not permitted to write down what I did not hear clearly. But I recorded the action: a twenty-nine-year-old man, who had lived through many derbies, placing a hand on the back of a twenty-year-old boy right before the worst moment of his short career. This is why I never begin a piece with the scoreline. The scoreline is the visible tip of an iceberg as long as the match itself. If you only look at the scoreline, you will think Real Madrid lost because of a referee's decision. If you look at the whole match, you see a team with a plan to cope with a numerical disadvantage, and a team that — for at least twenty minutes — had no plan at all. That is the story worth writing. As for me, after the match, I did not write immediately. I walked a lap around the stadium, recounting my notes, cross-checking the times on my watch against the recorded plays. I verified: the 63rd minute, red card. The 71st minute, Real Madrid's first substitution to rebuild structure. The 79th minute, Atlético's second goal. Those three milestones, placed side by side, tell a much simpler story than the "referee robbed us" narrative some wanted to tell after the match. In modern football, when what gets criticized is usually the referee and what gets ignored is usually team structure, I always remind myself of one principle. The truth is not in the press room. It is on the training ground the next day. And there, no camera waits. There is only grass, young players, and a forty-page notebook that never lies. Whenever a young player like Huijsen is criticized by the crowd after a bad moment, I remember the years I spent following young talents in small leagues, where they play in far more deprived conditions. In those places, a mistake is not replayed nine times on television, is not dissected on punditry shows, and does not become a symbol in a refereeing debate. It is just a play. And they learn to live with it. In the big leagues, that learning process is far harder. A twenty-year-old at Real Madrid must absorb pressure equivalent to that of a thirty-five-year-old veteran. And when they are not given enough time to absorb it, they become symbols of stories not one of them wrote. This is what I always want my readers to remember. A match can be retold in hundreds of different ways. But the notebook records only one. And that version is always faithful to what happened — not one word added, not one word removed. In the days ahead, as football forums in Vietnam and around the world continue to debate that red card, I will be at the training ground, recording the defensive situations Real Madrid practice and the spaces their back line exposes under Atlético's pressure. I will listen to the players' families, because they know better than anyone the pressure their young men are carrying. And I will not forget the most important thing. When everyone argues about a red card, the real signal is on the training ground on Monday. There, there are no spectators, no cameras. Only the ball, the grass, repeated drills. And an answer gradually taking shape that no one has yet spoken. My question for next week is simple. Will Real Madrid have the courage to look into their own notebook — the one they also keep, in the form of video and data analysis — or will they keep rereading the printed photos on the press-conference table? The answer will be written in the next round. And I will be there, with my forty-page notebook, ready to record what happened — not what anyone wanted it to be.