Look: US Open Joins the Real Madrid Penalty Meme Craze

Real Madrid have had quite the chaotic start to their 2024/25 season after having already played out some dramatic games 2 months into the campaign.

Los Blancos are undefeated 9 games into the season, having won six of those games and are currently sitting in second place in La Liga – three points behind league leaders Barcelona (21 points).

But some might argue that the reason for Los Blancos’ undefeated record is the crazy number of penalties they’ve received in under 10 matches this season.

Carlo Ancelotti’s side has been gifted six penalties in only eight league games so far this season, with only the penalty goals themselves helping them pick up seven points already.

Kylian Mbappe has soared to five goals in seven La Liga games because four of those goals have come from penalties.

Real Madrid have frustrated a lot of opposition fans with their tendency of getting so many penalty kicks and this has now become a running joke that is going viral among non-football fans too.

Recently, the US Open TikTok account (that has 1.7 million followers) created a clip that took a major dig at Real Madrid’s penalty-winning tendancies.

A tongue-in-cheek meme video released from the account recently saw them show a clip of Russian tennis star Daniil Medvedev (current world no.5) falling down on the ground during a US Open match after mistakenly tangling his two legs against each other.

But right after that incident, the clip moves to a La Liga referee pointing to the penalty spot with the words of a commentator saying ‘Penalti a favor el Real Madrid’ which basically translates to ‘Penalty in the favor of Real Madrid’.

This is actually reference to a running joke on social media (mostly promoted by Barcelona fans) that claims that Real Madrid receives penalties for the most minute of fouls or potential slips in the penalty area.

Some of the penalty decisions have come from opposition hand-ball incidents in the box, which could be debated that the opponent player didn’t even handle the ball intentionally.

But the outrage over Real Madrid receiving soft penalties reached a boiling point after their recent 4-1 win over Espanyol.

Towards the end of that game, Los Blancos received a penalty after Endrick was penalized by an opposition player.

But an instant replay of the incident showed that the Brazilian forward was clearly impeded outside the box by the Espanyol defender – only for the referee to mistakenly think he was taken down in the box and give a penalty to Los Blancos.

What was even more infuriating about this particular penalty incident is how the VAR team even refused to look into the matter and fix the referee’s mistake.

This has created the general feeling that Real Madrid tend to get penalties whenever their players go down in the box, be it whether after an illegal foul from an opposition player or even if they slip up in the area.

In fact, their penalty-winning habits was recently also mocked in a store in Valencia (Spain). It showed a ‘slippery floor’ sign that had the words ‘Attention, slippery floor. If you fall, penalty kick to Real Madrid’.

It’s clear that the US Open Tiktok account’s admins caught wind of this Real Madrid penalty campaign and decided to make this clip to get some more interaction from football or Los Blancos fans.

To their credit, it has worked quite well as the clip has gone viral across multiple social media platforms and probably earned them some more followers on TikTok too!