We started paying attention to Arda Güler for the simplest reason: national sentiment. To one of us, he was like a son; to the other, like a brother, a left-footed midfielder to look up to. We felt joy when he ran onto the pitch; concern when he didn’t play well; spitting rage at Real Madrid’s coach, Carlo Ancelotti, for not giving him more time; disdain for the English commentators who couldn’t pronounce his name. We walked around the house, doing impressions. “Ahr-duh Goo-ler!”
In the beginning, there was nothing about him that justified our feelings. After joining Real Madrid as an eighteen-year-old in 2023, he spent most of his first season injured and his second on the bench. His appearance in the 2024 Euro Cup was overshadowed by the foolishness of his teammate, Merih Demiral, who celebrated a goal against Austria by making the hand gesture of the neofascist Grey Wolves and was subsequently banned from the quarterfinals, nearly causing a diplomatic crisis between Türkiye and Germany. Then, Arda had three strokes of good luck: Ancelotti left for Brazil; Madrid declined to renew midfielder Luka Modrić’s contract; and the club hired a new coach, Xabi Alonso, tasking him with creating a younger, fresher team.
There is something wildly affirming about watching a person grow into your love for them. With Arda, it was nothing dramatic. There were no big gestures, no flashy moves. Slowly, he became faster, smarter, more vigorous. He would receive the ball with his right foot and give it a gentle tap with his left while scanning the field, often waiting a second or two or turning a hair’s breadth before sending a long, perfectly placed pass to the outstretched foot of, usually, Kylian Mbappé. Arda would control the ball for no more than five or six seconds. But his plays felt longer; we could see how he watched, plotted, spied gaps, and calculated angles, over and over again. There was a wonderful subtlety to his left foot—how its passes skimmed through bewildered defenders and its corner kicks floated onto his teammates’ heads.
His style had clarity, directness, a classical geometry, and the apparent artlessness of discipline. This meant that any deviations, whether good or bad, were more startling than they would be for more volatile players. Earlier this year, during a game against Elche, Arda tied the record for the longest distance goal in La Liga history. Elche’s keeper was out of the box, and Arda, who was deep in his own half, saw him backpedaling, lunged into open space, lowered his head like a bull about to charge in Las Ventas, and struck the ball. When it bounced in, Álvaro Arbeloa, who had replaced Alonso mid-season, grabbed his head in shock, as if to check that his hair was still on. On Reddit, Arda’s stans called for FIFA to award him the Puskás, immediately. His haters (among them, a user suspiciously named “Larry_Kane”) posted a video of Arda’s other, most famous kick to date; when, in the finals of the Spanish Super Cup against Barcelona, he kicked a water bottle, lost his balance, and slipped.
We finished writing this while Real Madrid played Bayern Munich in the second leg of the Champions League quarterfinals. By halftime, Arda had already scored twice. The first was forty seconds into the game, when a terrible pass from Bayern’s keeper, Manuel Neuer, sent the ball toward Arda’s left foot. There was a single, sweeping motion, and the ball soared over the head of Neuer, a great hulk of a man, who suddenly looked like a stunned child watching a plane take off for the first time. The second was a free kick. Again, that left foot descended onto the ball with power and grace. It curved into the goal, glanced off Neuer’s fingertips, and sent both him and the ball tumbling into the net.
Then, it all fell apart. Bayern scored twice in the second half to win on aggregate. Arda got in the ref’s face and received a red card after the match. It was classic kid behavior. Naturally, we blamed everyone else: the Madrid forwards, the Madrid defenders, Harry Kane’s dumb face (“He looks like there’s nothing in his head but a gerbil running on a wheel!” one of us shouted to the other), the referee, the city of Munich. But not Arda; never Arda, who is one of us now, and can do no wrong.