Real Madrid has won the Champions League, the biggest prize in club football, 15 times. The club in second place has won it 7. Liverpool and Bayern Munich, two of the biggest names in the game, have 6 each. One club has won it more than twice as often as anyone in history.
The competition started back in the 1950s. Real Madrid won it the first five years in a row, and no club has come close to that since. They are also the only club to pull off a three-year streak in the modern Champions League, taking it in 2016, 2017 and 2018. They have reached the final 18 times. Nobody else has reached even 12.
In 2000, FIFA, the body that runs world football, held a vote for the best club of the 20th century. Real Madrid won with 42% of the vote. Even Manchester United, one of the biggest clubs in the world, came second with under 10%, less than a quarter of Madrid's total.
Spain tells the same story. Real Madrid has won the Spanish league 36 times, more than anyone. Their big rival Barcelona is next, on 29.
Off the pitch the gap is even wider. Forbes, the magazine that works out what these clubs are worth, puts Real Madrid at 9.5 billion dollars. That makes them the football club worth the most money on the planet, for the fifth year in a row, a full 2 billion more than Barcelona in second place. Last year the club pulled in 1.27 billion dollars. No sports team anywhere on Earth has ever made that much in a single year, not even the Dallas Cowboys, who held the record before.
Real Madrid has gone two full seasons without winning the league or the Champions League, and they are still number one on every list there is. Mbappé put his finger on it in that same interview. Fans get amnesia, he said. You win everything, and by the next morning they have forgotten.
15 trophies to 7. Mbappé called them the greatest club in the world, and for once a footballer talking up his own team has the numbers to prove it.
22 goals and 18 assists for Germany. 30 goal contributions in 39 games as Arsenal’s striker.
Havertz might be the most disrespected good player in world football right now.