Aurelien Tchouameni and Fede Valverde, two of the most important players in Real Madrid's midfield, appear to have put a disagreement behind them. Spanish reports noted the pair looking notably close and comfortable together during the recent win over Elche, a public sign that the tension between them from last season has cooled.

The two are said to have clashed at some point during the previous campaign. The details of the fallout matter less than the resolution. Two competitors who care enough to argue also, more often than not, care enough to fix it, and that is what appears to have happened here as Madrid roll into a busy stretch of the schedule.

This is a normal thing that happens inside every serious team, and it almost never gets reported. Players who are demanding of themselves and of each other will occasionally collide. The measure of a group is not whether those collisions happen. It is whether the group can absorb them and come out the other side still pulling in one direction.

For US coaches, this is one of the most useful stories in today's feed, because you will deal with your own version of it before the season is out. Two of your best U16s will get into it in training or in the car park after a loss. How you handle the next 48 hours decides whether that friction becomes a fracture.

The trap coaches fall into is trying to make the two players like each other. That is not the job. The job is to get them to respect each other and to work together, and those are different things. Plenty of great teammates would not choose to have dinner together. They still trust each other to be in the right spot at the right time.

Madrid did not resolve this with a team meeting broadcast to the press. It got sorted quietly, over time, in the environment the coaching staff created. The winning helps, because winning papers over a lot, but the underlying point is that the standards of the group were bigger than the argument between two of its members.

The practical move for your team is to name it and normalize it early. Tell your players in preseason that they will disagree, sometimes heatedly, and that disagreement is allowed. What is not allowed is carrying it onto the field or letting it split the group. Then hold them to it, and let the small stuff resolve itself the way Madrid's did.