Four minutes. That's all the time Endrick had been given for Real Madrid before he walked onto the pitch in Rome and walked off with the UEFA Man of the Match award. He scored. Real Madrid came from behind to win 4-3. A kid who'd barely been allowed to touch the grass this season was the best player on it.
People are arguing about whether Endrick, Arda Güler, and the rest of the young players on that bench should be starting ahead of Vinícius and Mbappé. They should. The man stopping it is the one who picks the team.
Mourinho started his established names in a Champions League away game and watched them fall behind. He threw on the kids, and they fixed it. Güler came on and started teeing up goals. Endrick finished one. The substitutes were simply better than the men they replaced, and they only got the chance once the night was already slipping away.
This was a clear signal from the squad to the manager.
The defense of the status quo goes like this: the suspicion floating around is that Vinícius keeps his place because someone upstairs likes him, whatever his form says. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. It doesn't change the verdict. If a player is starting because of a preference rather than his current football, that's an even worse reason to keep him there. He earns the shirt on the pitch or he doesn't, and right now the pitch is making the case for the teenagers.
There's a convenient opening, too. Vinícius picked up a four-match ban and misses El Clasico. The excuse is gone. You don't have to bench anyone to find out what Endrick does over 90 minutes against Barcelona. The slot is sitting there empty. Fill it with the forward who just won a European night off the bench. Reputation shouldn't decide this one.
And spare me the idea that the squad can't afford to gamble on youth. Real Madrid went out and paid a record fee for Yan Diomande, another young attacker, in the summer. You don't spend that kind of money on young talent and then treat starting them like a reckless experiment. Either you believe in the project you built or you're just hoarding players to keep them off other teams.
Endrick said he works every day to help the team. He's done the hard part. He's shown you what he is with almost no runway at all. The only question left is whether the man picking the team is brave enough to act on what his own eyes keep telling him. In Rome he wasn't. He fixed his mistake once. Now he should stop making it.
