Barcelona & Real Madrid Have Proven They Are The Best Teams In The World

Goal :    By now, you might feel like you’ve heard more than enough about El Clasico. You might even be getting sick of it.

Maybe you don’t believe the hype. You might be thinking that two penalties in game one and a header throughout 120 minutes of game two go nowhere near towards proving this really is the greatest football fixture on earth. But big matches seldom live up to their billing, especially if the pre-match anticipation is (as is so often the case) predicated purely on plenty of shots and plenty of goals.

But there’s so much more to it than that. The story so far, for their comeback from a 5-0 demolition to a 1-0 AET cup final triumph in five months, has been almost all about Real Madrid. Their transformation has been incredible, and many didn’t see it coming.

One man who did, though, was Pep Guardiola. That’s unusual in itself: it would have been easy for Pep, leading Barcelona to success after unprecedented success, to grow complacent, even arrogant, as he displayed his side’s superiority with five straight Clasico victories. He is, after all, immersed constantly in the culture of Camp Nou, and if he wished to revel in his rivals’ misfortune, few would blame him.

Yet he never once – even after the 5-0 game – betrayed anything but the utmost respect for Real Madrid, while also showing an awesome level of prescience about the promise held at Valdebebas. Partially this is because Guardiola knew that Barcelona were doing something very special: those five consecutive wins saw the Catalan side play some of the best football they have ever exhibited during this golden era, with performances ranging from merely world class to those that were at times supernatural. Simply put, Barcelona made Madrid look bad – worse than they were.

Guardiola – and of course Jose Mourinho – knew all along that the capital club had a team waiting to explode. Their failings have been on the big stage – the Clasicos, the Champions League, where greatness is truly defined – and that would never be repaired overnight. Now, though, we see that Mourinho has made that ‘little big’ difference by instilling his own intangible brand of confidence and unity throughout the squad, and adding into the mix his incomparable knack for the gameplan. The quality, though perhaps not quite on this level, has always been there.

Now silverware is in the Bernabeu trophy cabinet for the first time in almost three years – silverware won directly at the expense of Barcelona – and Madrid have also been the strongest performing team in the Champions League so far. The bookies told a story all of their own at the start of the competition, with the two Liga giants remaining the favorites all the way, and for once Madrid have lived up to their billing. Now they and Barca face each other for the right to go to the Wembley final against either Schalke 04 or Manchester United.