Carvajal finally opens up about his Real Madrid exit and his relationship with Arbeloa

Some exits get told in circles, and some get told head on. Dani Carvajal chose the latter. After months of silence, the right back spoke for the first time about how his departure from Real Madrid unfolded, and about the disagreements he had in his final stretch there with Alvaro Arbeloa, the coach under whom he lost his starting spot before packing his bags for Getafe.

The story is well known by now: Carvajal kept losing ground in the starting lineup to Trent Alexander-Arnold during his last months in white, and when his contract ran out in June, he decided not to renew. On October 13 he was unveiled as a new Getafe player, a club he has already debuted for under Jose Bordalas. What was missing was for the player himself to explain, in his own words, how he experienced that final stretch.

In an interview with El Larguero, the former Real Madrid captain was clear about his attitude during those months of limited playing time:

I always respected each and every one of Arbeloa's decisions. I trained as hard as I could to be available and to play whenever it was needed. If it was one minute, then it was one minute. I always respected that. I never had a complaint against the club or against the coach.Dani Carvajal

The tone shifted when he was asked directly about how the coach treated him. There, Carvajal preferred not to go into detail and turned the question back toward its original source:

I think that question needs to go straight to Alvaro. He can explain better why he said what he said. I can't tell you anything else. Sometimes things don't turn out the way you want.Dani Carvajal

What Arbeloa had said

To understand what Carvajal was getting at, you have to go back to February, when Arbeloa (who shared a locker room with Carvajal between 2013 and 2016) addressed the player's lack of playing time with an explanation that did not go unnoticed:

It's normal for a player not to be happy if he isn't playing as much as he wants. Everyone wants to feel important. I encourage everyone to work hard, and if you're not happy, you can come sit on the gray couch. But the collective comes before the individual.Alvaro Arbeloa

That line about the "gray couch" lingered for months, and now Carvajal, without directly attacking his former coach, is hinting that things were not quite as simple as they were made out to be at the time.

The paths of both men ultimately diverged completely. Arbeloa also left the Real Madrid bench at the end of last season, barely six months after arriving, and now manages Fulham, a club currently sitting 15th in the Premier League. Carvajal, for his part, found in Getafe a place to reconnect with top level soccer after closing out a chapter of more than a decade at the Santiago Bernabeu.