The Real Madrid full back gave an interview with magazine Club del Deportista and discussed his side's current position and the departure of the Portuguese.
Real Madrid’s Brazil full back Marcelo spoke to Madrid-based lifestyle magazine Club del Deportista and discussed the club’s difficult start to the season, the departure of Cristiano Ronaldo and how his move to the Bernabeu caught him by surprise.
On Ronaldo, Marcelo said the Portugal captain’s decision to leave was never going to be easy to compensate for: “He is a player who as well as being my teammate is my friend, as he is with Sergio [Ramos] and Luka [Modric]. It’s obvious that when the best player in the world isn’t in your team you’re going to miss him. But I don’t want to say that we don’t have the best players in the world in every position. Any team would like to have Cristiano with them, but Madrid will continue to be Madrid despite players coming and going.”
The 30-year-old Rio native also discussed Real’s turbulent start to the season, which has seen Julen Lopetegui fired and Santiago Solari oversee Real’s heaviest home defeat in Europe: “We haven’t got to February yet, and that’s when the season starts to be decided. It’s not normal to draw conclusions in September when we’ve only been playing for a month. People can criticize, but evaluating a season at this stage is crazy. We have the Club World Cup coming up and we have to win that and we’re still in contention in every competition.”
Marcelo: "It's never entered my mind to leave Real Madrid"
The Brazil international, who has been linked with a move to Turin to join Ronaldo at Juventus, said he had never thought about leaving the Bernabeu and that when his move from Fluminense came about in January 2007 he believed it “was a joke.”
“It’s never entered my mind to leave and look for another option. I have always done everything possible to stay at Real Madrid and I’ve never thought about playing time. If I had 15 minutes in every game, I’d give everything in those 15 minutes to play more and win more. The move all happened very quickly. At first I thought it was a joke. I always saw Madrid as a huge club. Then all of a sudden I was part of a team with players I had only seen on television or in video games. It was pretty amazing.”