The night Monaco broke the Galácticos – and why it matters now for Real Madrid

Real Madrid vs Monaco with a place in the Champions League top eight – and direct qualification for the round of 16 – on the line. It is a European matchup with very little history, just two previous meetings: the quarterfinals of the 2003–04 Champions League. A bitter memory for the Galácticos-era Madrid, whose slow disintegration began with that tie, against a Monaco coached by Didier Deschamps and featuring a figure on his staff who today oversees Madrid’s physical conditioning: Antonio Pintus.

The careers of Pintus and Deschamps ran in parallel for many years. They met at Juventus, where the Italian worked between 1991 and 1998. Those were years of incomplete European glory for the Turin club – Champions League winners in 1996 and finalists in 1997 and 1998, the latter against Real Madrid in Amsterdam. They crossed paths again at Chelsea, and Deschamps always valued Pintus’s working methods as a player, so it was only a matter of time before he brought him into his coaching career.

That moment came in 2001, when Deschamps took charge of AS Monaco. Pintus followed him there to help build a team that failed to win Ligue 1 but reached the Champions League final in 2004. On the way, Monaco knocked out Madrid in the quarterfinals, with another familiar name playing a key role: Fernando Morientes. Madrid won the first leg 4–1, but Morientes scored to make it 4–2 and keep the tie alive. In the return leg, Raúl González opened the scoring, yet the team coached by Carlos Queiroz eventually collapsed, losing 3–1 – with Morientes scoring again – and were eliminated under the now-defunct away-goals rule.

That Madrid side became a textbook example of poor squad management, with almost no rotation and a second unit far below the level of the starters. The result was exhaustion at the business end of the season and failure in every competition, despite looking on course for a treble. Monaco, by contrast, were flying and reached the final in Gelsenkirchen, where they lost to FC Porto coached by José Mourinho.

Pintus’s imprint on that Monaco side was unmistakable, as Morientes recalled on Cope: “I’ve worked with many fitness coaches, and above all of them is Pintus. My playing weight at 26 was 183 pounds, give or take a pound. He got me down to 175 in three weeks. I’ve never been so hungry in my life as I was with this guy. He’s friendly, communicative… but a bastard like no other. He told me I could be between 174 and 176. If I was 176.2, I paid a fine.”

The sacrifice paid off. “My best physical experience in 17 years as a professional was at Monaco,” Morientes said. “At the time I wanted to kill him. But years later, he’s the best I ever had, based on how I felt. Deschamps brought him because he’d had him at Juventus. With him we were European runners-up with a vulnerable team that was mediocre outside France. Then he leaves with Deschamps for Juventus and takes them back up to Serie A. I had him again at Marseille, who hadn’t won the league in who knows how many years, and we won the league and the cup. There are coincidences, but coincidences always have small details, and this guy is a detail in a big machine that adds a lot.”

That is the effect Madrid are now hoping for with Pintus’s return to the forefront. During Xabi Alonso’s stint, he was confined to a performance manager role and had no involvement in the team’s preparation, either in preseason or day to day. That responsibility belonged to Ismael Camenforte, who has since been dismissed. Under Álvaro Arbeloa, Pintus is once again running the physical side of training, and the new Madrid coach is placing his trust in him: “We have a lot of room for improvement physically. That’s what Antonio is here for – to give us an extra edge. We need him.”

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