Big Two increasingly in a Liga of their own as Spain becomes a 'Scotland in the sun'

PRIMERA LIGA EL CLASICO:Real Madrid and Barcelona are the Goliaths of Spanish football and their crucial clash tonight will fascinate fans worldwide

BARCELONA AND Real Madrid keep getting bigger and better. Just ask Valencia. The third largest city in Spain boasts a decent soccer team. They’re in the semi-finals of this year’s Europa League. They won a couple of league championships in the early part of the last decade, the most recent coming in 2004 under the stewardship of Rafa Benitez.

That win in 2004 was the last time a team other than Barca or Madrid won the country’s premier division (no one in Spain uses the royal appendage when referring to the country’s most successful team). Valencia are lying third in the table this season, the same position they finished in 2011 and 2010.

At the moment, they are closer to the relegation zone than they are to second-placed Barcelona, who they trail by 29 points. A similar gulf separated the club from the Big Two last year and the year before. La Liga has become “Scotland in the sun”. It’s a two-horse race, at a time when Spanish football has never been stronger.

Spain, who face Giovanni Trapattoni’s Ireland side on June 14th, hold both the European Championship and World Cup trophies. The country’s underage teams are pre-eminent. They have won eight European under-17 titles, more than any other country, and are the holders of Europe’s under-19 and under-21 crowns.

In club football, three of its teams have reached this year’s Europa League semi-finals. Barca and Real Madrid are, of course, at the same stage of the Champions League. In March, Athletic Bilbao filleted Manchester United, perennial winners of the English Premier League, over two legs in the Europa League. Athletic lie seventh in the Spanish league table standings. Barca also cruised past United in the 2009 and 2011 finals of the Champions League.

La Liga would be heralded as the finest league in the world were it not for the fact that Barca and Real Madrid dwarf the other 18 premier division teams. Their annual budgets are four times bigger than any other team in the league.

TV money is at the root of the problem. Spain differs, for example, from the Premier League in England regarding the honey pot generated by television rights. There is no collective bargaining for the money divvied up on the domestic scene. Each team negotiates individually.

Few of the other teams in Spain have a strong bargaining position. According to the Spanish Football Federation, one recent premier division game that didn’t involve Barca or Real Madrid had 47 pay-per-view customers. In a season, the two clubs trouser about €120 million each (about €60 million more than Manchester United). Valencia get €45 million. The other Spanish teams get dwindling fractions.

The relegation zone teams get about a tenth of their takings. This takes no account of the money the two clasico teams rake in from televised action of their Champions League exploits or ticket sales or merchandising or sponsorship.

Attempts to split the domestic TV money up more equitably have, to date, failed. The majority of the other La Liga clubs are cowed. “The thing is, when Madrid and Barcelona stand before them, when Florentino [Perez, Real Madrid’s president] starts to talk, the other clubs s**t themselves,” said one renegade Espanol director, after a failed round-table attempt in September 2011 at redistribution along similar lines to Europe’s other big leagues.

In the meantime, the money funds their extravagant squad purchases. Real Madrid’s bench would beat most international teams. Last Tuesday night against Bayern Munich, their bench included former Ballon d’Or winner Kaka amongst the unused subs. The club invokes a clause when loaning (and sometimes in selling) players to other clubs – if the player excels with his new team, he isn’t allowed to play against Real Madrid, as happened, for example, this season with Valencia’s talented midfielder Sergio Canales.

Spain’s bankers, have always treated the country’s two marquee clubs indulgently. As far back as the 1970s, when Barcelona pulled off the transfer coup of the decade in coaxing Johan Cruyff to the Camp Nou, Banca Catalana registered the deal as an agricultural import, which legally entitled the club to a low interest rate.

Today, Barca, despite having won 13 trophies over the last three years, are in debt to the tune of €578 million.

Simon Kuper, the football writer, makes the point that sports economists have long trumpeted: most fans support big clubs. They prefer Goliaths. They don’t want equality. They like dynasties, and they don’t care much for upsets. Even supporters of the minnows like being able, in the case of Spanish club football, to try and sock it to the Big Two.

The buoyancy of overall television viewing figures and match attendances, even as Barca and Real Madrid surge ahead of the pack with each passing year, confirms this worrying contentment.

Sometimes, the clubs don’t even put up a fight – they’ll field second-string teams when they meet either of the Barca-Madrid axis in the league. When Sporting Gijon rolled over against Barcelona at the Camp Nou last season, having kicked off the game without eight regular starters, their former manager pleaded: “Look, you need to understand algebra to beat Barcelona”.

The defeatism is seeping into the mindset of the league’s players. A player from one of the clasico teams recently said that while he accepts the difference between Barcelona and Real Madrid and the rest is tangible, it has become an excuse for teams to hide behind. They have come to lack ambition.

Real Madrid, who lead Barcelona by four points ahead of tonight’s game between the two sides at the Camp Nou, are breaking all kinds of records this season. Were they to beat Barca, they could conceivably finish the season on 100 points. Their goalscoring average, over three a game, is the highest recorded in Europe’s major leagues since the second World War.

With five games to play, they have already scored 107 goals in La Liga, which equals the record for the most number of goals scored in a season set by John Toshack’s Real Madrid team in 1989-1990.

The team plays like a whirlwind. A lot of Madrid’s goals come from corner kicks – the opposition team’s corners, as they sweep upfield in counterattacks. Half their goals come within 20 seconds of regaining possession.

Real Madrid’s totem player, Cristiano Ronaldo, has been bagging the lion’s share of his team’s goals.

Remarkably, he has scored 139 goals in 138 games since joining the club in 2009. Last season, he ratcheted up 40 league goals, surpassing the record number of goals scored in a season by two. This year, he has already netted 41 times. So, too, has his nemesis – Barca’s wunderkind, Leo Messi. The pair have scored more league goals alone than Liverpool since last August.

The heat is on Mourinho. The outcome of his time at Real Madrid is balanced precariously, particularly given the late-goal advantage ceded to Bayern Munich in the first leg of the Champions League semi-final. He has never failed as a manager, but he is working for no ordinary employer. Men like Spain’s World Cup-winning manager Vicente del Bosque and Fabio Capello (twice) have had to walk the plank after winning league titles at the club.

Perez, the club’s president, bulldozed his way through seven managers in four seasons before hitting on Mourinho. The Special One has set his stall on winning the league title.

“The important thing for us is to win the league,” he said in February. It would be a unique personal achievement, as no other manager has won leagues in England, Italy and Spain.

Barca, after a sluggish winter by their standards, are in imperious domestic form. They have already qualified for the final of Spain’s cup competition, in which they knocked out Real Madrid in the quarter-final in January, a two-legged series remembered for Real Madrid’s boorish, 2-1 defeat in the first game at the Bernabeu and Pepe’s stamp on Messi’s hand while the Argentine lay on the ground.

Barcelona have won 11 league games on the bounce. Real Madrid, meanwhile, are “crumbling” in the words of former Barca coach Charly Rexach. Three draws in five games have shaved six points off their former 10-point cushion.

In 10 efforts, Mourinho has only won one clasico, and that was after extra-time in last year’s Copa del Rey final. He has history with Barca, having worked there as a translator-cum-assistant coach for four years in the late 1990s, and he was passed over as a potential manager in 2008 for Guardiola.

Mourinho despises the holier-than-thou attitude of Guardiola and the Barcelona project, a collection he disparagingly refers to as “the beautiful children of football”. He constantly targets Guardiola.

“The interesting thing,” he said in a press conference last month, “is that there are people much smarter than me that sell an image and get to have a completely different picture than mine.” The dig drew Guardiola, who responded: “Next time, say the name Mourinho.”

During the clubs’ ill-tempered four-game series last spring, Mourinho’s goading of Guardiola prompted the Catalan chief to swear twice on national TV during a 45-minute tirade, a rare outburst that prompted a front-page story on El Pais.

Mourinho is running out of friends in Spain. They say he’s bocazas, big-mouthed. His aggressive manner has alienated fans around the country, not only in Barcelona. Last October, an AS/Ikerfel study found there was less aversion to Real Madrid at Barca than at several of Spain’s other clubs, with higher rates of hate coming from, among others, Osasuna, Athletic Bilbao and Real Sociedad.

He is also struggling to hold onto a dressingroom, made up of mercenaries from Germany, Turkey, Brazil and Argentina, but has two main factions: the Portuguese and Spanish. The latter group, including Ronaldo, Pepe, Ricardo Carvalho and Fabio Coentrao, share Mourinho’s agent, Jorge Mendes.

Mourinho has been schooling his players all season to badger referees. Criticising them is the central plank of his communications strategy. It even extends to haranguing the ref in the car park after matches, as El Mundo Deportivo, one of Barcelona’s daily sports newspaper, alleges he did the last time he visited the Camp Nou.

Led by team captain Iker Casillas, the Spanish contingent in his squad, however, refused twice after recent draws with Villarreal and Valencia to do his dirty work, unconvinced that it wins them favourable referring decisions.

The insubordination has confounded Mourinho. He’s so morose he has refused to attend any press conferences until the end of the season, except, under obligation, for the Champions League ones.

Casillas and Mourinho fell out after last summer’s Super Copa final, the one in which Mourinho gouged the eye of Barcelona’s assistant coach, Tito Vilanova. The captain and the manager didn’t speak to each other for a month. Casillas had a breakfast meeting with Xavi while on international duty to help patch things up between the two warring clubs.

Mourinho didn’t like him breaking ranks and said as much in a squad meeting.

“Everybody pull in the same direction?” said Casillas. “What does that mean? All of us go in the direction that you want to go? That’s the last time you make a shit of me in front of my companeros!”

Mourinho will be hoping they pull together for him tonight. It might be his last clasico.

Richard Fitzpatrick’s book El Clasico: Barcelona v. Real Madrid, Football’s Greatest Rivalry will be published by Bloomsbury in August.