Why is Barcelona vs Real Madrid a rivalry?

Roberto Carlos in action for Real Madrid against Barcelona and Brazil team-mate Rivaldo in October 2000.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

One of the most-anticipated league game in world football will be upon us this weekend as Real Madrid and Barcelona go head to head in El Classico on Saturday evening.

The two sides have a long and bitter history of rivalry amid their various triumphs and failures stretches back for over a hundred years, making the game a must-watch for football fans all around the globe.

So how did the rivalry between two sides over 300 miles apart come to be, and how did it get to be so intense?

Why is Barcelona vs Real Madrid a rivalry?

Real Madrid (seen here in 1960) dominated the European Cup in its early years (Image credit: Getty Images)In his book Morbo: The Story of Spanish Football, Phil Ball traces the antipathy all the way back to a 1905 tournament organised by Madrid – not to be known as Real for another 15 years – that also feature Barcelona, Espanyol, New Football de Madrid, and Basque side Vizcaya, who won the tournament.

Seemingly unhappy that their side had not featured in the final (Barca finished runners-up after knocking Madrid out 3-1, the organisers hastily arranged a third-place play-off that Madrid won and were subsequently awarded a trophy. As Ball puts it: “Madrid’s reputation as poor losers seems have been born almost immediately”.

Luis Figo’s move from Real Madrid to Barcelona was hugely controversial (Image credit: Getty Images)When the two sides met each other again in Barcelona in 1908, Barca were again the victors, winning 5-2 – but as the two sides dined together afterwards, Barca were upset to hear their guests complaining about the ‘unsporting nature of the encounter, the partial nature of the referee’s decisions, and the indelicate phrases used by certain sections of the spectating public’.

The rivalry was clearly bitter from the beginning purely in a sporting sense, then – but the constant political upheaval and civil wars over much of the rest of the 20th century added an extra edge, to say the least.

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Sitting in the middle of Spain, the city of Madrid became even more central under the dictatorship of Franco from 1939-75. After coming to power following the Spanish civil war, Franco despised the regional nationalism of areas like the Basque Country and Catalonia, home to the coastal city of Barcelona, and actively suppressed acts of regional identity outside his narrow, Madrid-based view of what was and wasn’t ‘Spanish’.

Franco had banned all public use of the Catalan language, for instance; naturally, serious political resentment only grew out of that. In discussing the growing enmity between the two clubs, Ball highlights how a 1943 Copa del Rey clash led Franco’s pet journalists to deride Barca fans for their ‘clear intention to attack the representatives of Spain’ after they booed the referee and Madrid players following an injury to their star player. They were, in effect, being accused of being unpatriotic…at least, under the Francoist view.

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The supposition that Franco was also instructing referees to favour Real Madrid was widespread. The extent of this is disputed, but either way, it only intensified the rivalry further and further.

We are not experts here on the ins and outs of Spanish politics and nor shall we pretend to be, but suffice it to say that there has been a lot of political beef between the two cities – and that the competitive nature of their rivalry on the pitch has only added to what was already a rather disdainful attitude towards one another.

Since La Liga was formed in 1929, Real have won 36 league titles and Barcelona 27; every other club in Spain put together have 30. Real and Barcelona have been runners-up a combined 53 times, often to each other.

Both sides have exchanged periods of domination and relative decline, while transfers have been controversial all the way back to a debacle around Alfredo di Stefano in the 1950s all the way to Luis Figo leaving Barca to join Real in 2000.

That mutual disliking is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

Steven Chicken has been working as a football writer since 2009, taking in stints with Football365 and the Huddersfield Examiner. Steven still covers Huddersfield Town home and away for his own publication, WeAreTerriers.com. Steven is a two-time nominee for Regional Journalist of the Year at the prestigious British Sports Journalism Awards, making the shortlist in 2020 and 2023.