Julen Lopetegui is confident Real Madrid can replace Cristiano Ronaldo’s goals, but there will not be any additional pressure placed on Gareth Bale.
Ronaldo, the club’s all-time record goalscorer, departed for Juventus in the off-season, having inspired four Champions League titles in his final five seasons at the Bernabeu.
And despite initial links with numerous big names, including Neymar and Eden Hazard, Madrid have not recruited a high-profile replacement for the Portuguese.
The absence of Madrid’s usual talisman has seen Bale, a match-winner in May’s European final, receive more attention, but Lopetegui plans to share the goalscoring burden as well as shoring up the defence.
“It doesn’t worry us. What we have to do is to try to make ourselves capable of replacing those goals, to try to even improve on them,” Lopetegui told a news conference. “We don’t want it to be something that is the responsibility of anyone in particular.
“There are only two ways of doing that: scoring more goals spread across more players or letting in less goals. That’s a responsibility the team has as well
“We have to try to do that to be the team that we want to be in the future.”
