No Mbappé. Only 10 men. No problem for Real Madrid in FIFA event in Charlotte
When one of your biggest stars was hospitalized a few days ago, and when your defender makes a red-carded mistake in the seventh minute, you might think you were in trouble if you were Real Madrid in the FIFA Club World Cup.
However, Real Madrid is one of the world’s best soccer clubs for a reason, and it showed that Sunday, playing a man down for 83 minutes and still whipping Mexico’s CF Pachuca, 3-1, in Bank of America Stadium.
The match was played before 70,248 roaring fans in the Queen City — about 90% of them cheering for Real Madrid — and was the first of four Club World Cup matches that will be played this month in Charlotte. If this one was any indication, Charlotte’s reputation as a soccer town will only be burnished by its piece of this event (there are 32 teams playing in a total of 63 matches around the country in the month-long event). With the tournament roughly half over, the 70,248 fans who showed up Sunday afternoon in Charlotte marked the second-most any game in the tournament has drawn so far, trailing only the 80,619 that came to the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles for a match one week before.
Fans Sunday would have loved to have seen Mbappé, one of the world’s most well-known futbol players. So would I, but Mbappé didn’t even fly to Charlotte from Real Madrid’s temporary base in Florida. He was briefly hospitalized last week with what the team had described as an “acute case of gastroenteritis.”
On Sunday, Real Madrid manager Xabi Alonso said he remained hopeful that Mbappé would return to play on Thursday in the team’s final game of group play, against RB Salzburg. Alonso bears a striking resemblance to Panthers head coach Dave Canales, and he sounded a lot like Canales too, when he sat at the same postgame podium that Canales sits in following Panthers game and proclaimed that the team would need to take Mbappé’s health “day by day.”
Real Madrid still has a host of stars without Mbappé, but no team wants to play nearly an entire match with only 10 men. That’s what Real Madrid had to do, however, after defender Raul Asencio was shown a red card after a flagrant foul just outside the penalty box in the seventh minute.
Pachuca didn’t score off that mistake, though, and Real Madrid instead dominated play.
Said Real Madrid’s Jude Bellingham, who would soon score the match’s first goal: “Yeah, it was obviously tough after Asencio was sent off. ... It was a test of our character. A test of our leadership as well. ... When we had our chances, we were clinical and we took them.”
With superb play from goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois shoring up the back end, Real Madrid led 2-0 at halftime and then added a third goal in the 70th minute. Pachuca finally scored in the 80th minute to avoid a shutout, after Elias Montiel cranked a shot that deflected off a defender and into the goal. But that was it, and the Real Madrid fans could celebrate.
One note about those fans: I’m not sure what the reason was, but the lines to get into Bank of America Stadium about an hour before the match Sunday had, in some cases, thousands of people in them, standing in the 90-degree heat. I’ve attended dozens of sold-out or nearly sold-out events in this stadium, which was a few thousand short of capacity, and these were undoubtedly some of the longest lines I’ve seen. I don’t fault the workers who were trying to process people through security — they were doing their best — but something was wrong with the overall system. It shouldn’t have taken that long; it rarely does, even with crowds of the exact same size.
With all that said, the event (played on grass, just like Panthers games should be!) felt big-time, and I’m glad Charlotte is a part of it. Bringing big-time soccer to Charlotte has been a continuing quest for Tepper Sports & Entertainment and the city of Charlotte. This was another big step in that direction.
This story was originally published June 23, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "No Mbappé. Only 10 men. No problem for Real Madrid in FIFA event in Charlotte."
