There is a quiet anniversary folded into Saturday night’s team sheet. The Fede Valverde Real Madrid story has one genuinely uncomfortable chapter in it, and Rayo Vallecano supplied the final page. When Los Blancos host the franjirrojos at the Santiago Bernabeu (21:00 CEST), the captain faces the side he played against in his last match as a Real Madrid right-back — 1 February 2026, per Marca — and he does so as the most settled man in Jose Mourinho’s midfield.
How a midfielder ended up at right-back
The whole episode started in the treatment room. With Dani Carvajal, then still at the club, and Trent Alexander-Arnold both injured, the coach at the time, Xabi Alonso, reached for the most obliging footballer in his squad. Valverde was asked to fill in at full-back and he did it — reluctantly, Marca reports, out of loyalty to the badge rather than any belief that it suited him. In total it ran to 16 matches in the position, a patch job that stretched well past the emergency that created it.
The Kairat Almaty flashpoint
Patience ran out in public. Speaking before the Champions League tie against Kairat Almaty, Valverde said what he had been swallowing for months. “I wasn’t born to play full-back, I didn’t grow up learning to play in that position,” he told the press, per Marca. “It was because of an emergency that I had to play there.”
The reply came the next day. Valverde was dropped to the bench, Raul Asencio took the right-back slot, and every camera in Kazakhstan found the Uruguayan during the warm-up: cold, hands behind his back, going through the motions. He never came on. It was the only Champions League match he missed all season, in a campaign in which he played every other one available to him, including the night he scored a hat-trick against Manchester City. Alonso’s first real crisis at the club had arrived, and it had Valverde’s name on it.
When Alvaro Arbeloa took the bench in January, the full-back minutes tapered rather than stopped, until that final shift against Rayo. The file was closed there. The splinter, as Marca puts it, took considerably longer to work its way out.
The Fede Valverde Real Madrid reset under Mourinho
Nothing about his situation now resembles that winter. Valverde wears the armband as club captain for 2026/27, and he is playing in the middle of the pitch where he has always insisted he belongs. He scored in the 2-1 win over Inter Milan on Tuesday, a goal he dedicated to his newborn daughter, and he is one of the few Madrid players to have come through a bumpy opening month with his standing intact.
That matters, because the mood around the stadium is not warm. Mundo Deportivo frames Saturday as another examination in front of a restless Bernabeu: Madrid were unconvincing even in beating Inter, the defeat at Real Betis has left them three points behind Barcelona, and a section of the support has spent the past fortnight making its feelings about the team’s football perfectly clear.
What Saturday asks of him
Mourinho gets his midfield back for this one. Eduardo Camavinga, Bernardo Silva and Arda Guler all return to the matchday squad after missing the Inter game, which hands the manager options he did not have in midweek and should push Valverde forward rather than deeper. Rayo have changed little from the side he last faced, and they arrive with problems of their own: a thinned-out squad, and a start to the season in which they have conceded 2.31 goals per 90 across four La Liga matches.
Symmetry rarely wins football matches. But there is something neat about the captain of Real Madrid closing the circle against the exact opponent his least favourite spell finished against — this time from his own position, with the armband on, in front of a crowd that needs convincing. See our predicted Real Madrid lineup against Rayo Vallecano for how Mourinho is expected to set up.
