WHEN EL CLASICO WENT LOCO
Duality was a cornerstone of late-Victorian literature’s most enduring characters.
The same yet different, each was inexorably defined by, and drawn to, the other. There was mistrust, hatred, but also a fascination with their opposite. Holmes vs Moriarty; Jekyll vs Hyde; Dracula vs Van Helsing; Dorian Gray vs his portrait – the more that these conflicted souls understood about their enemy, the more they learned about themselves.
Real Madrid and Barcelona were always destined to hate one another. They were born just a few years after those duality tales, but the teams of the establishment and of militant separatists could never be friends – not with such philosophical, political and geographical differences, amid a brutal Spanish Civil War and right-wing dictatorship from 1936 to 1975. Yet that shared antipathy tied them together.
“IF BARCELONA DIDN’T EXIST, WE’D HAVE TO INVENT THEM” FLORENTINO PEREZ, REAL MADRID PRESIDENT
Going into the 2000s, El Clasico had already been Spain’s biggest football match for over half a century. By the decade’s end, however, in which they shared seven La Liga titles and four European Cups, it had exploded into the biggest game on the planet. Spanish football’s behemoths had made their league the world’s hottest competition and turned themselves into the most glamorous destinations for top talent. So: why the sudden interest?
Simple. On July 24, 2000, Luis Figo left Barça and joined Real Madrid. Nothing would be the same again.
Just ask that pig.
“OF THE 10 BEST PLAYERS IN THE WORLD, WE’VE GOT FIVE”
In 1998, Real Madrid had awoken from their slumber – but something within gnawed away. The club which had defined itself by European Cup glory, ever since winning the competition’s first five tournaments in the late 1950s, had finally ended a 32-year wait for la septima – the seventh – but Barcelona were just… sexier.
During the 1999-00 campaign, Los Blancos were well placed in the Champions League, sure, but they had finished 11 points behind Barcelona in the previous La Liga season and entered the new millennium in mid-table. Madridismo couldn’t take it.
Florentino Perez decided to run for the office of Real Madrid president. A short, puffy-faced civil engineer, he was the president of ACS: Spain’s third-largest construction company, with a €4 billion turnover. What – the political and financial connections that greased wheels. He counted Jose Maria Aznar, the Spanish Prime Minister, as both a colleague and a friend.
