They are two of the biggest football clubs in the world and dominate the timesheets like no other.
Barcelona and Real Madrid are by far the most successful Spanish teams in terms of trophies won: Madrid has 101, Barcelona has 99. Third-placed Athletic Bilbao has only 35. They have huge fans and many of the players from the World Cup and El Clasico attract millions of people. eyeballs around the world.
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On Sunday, they will face each other for another piece of silver in the final of the Spanish Super Cup in Saudi Arabia, the 256th edition of the Clasico. This prompted The Athletic to investigate the most debatable question imaginable for both amateur teams: which is the bigger club?
In 2020, we did the same with English clubs and concluded that Manchester United was the biggest in the country based on metrics such as attendance, global fan base, and trophies. We’ve replicated those setups here, with a few tweaks to reflect the unique context in which Barcelona and Madrid play each other. One point will be awarded per category (except in some, where more than one point is offered) and the club with the highest overall score will be designated as the largest.
It is not intended to be clinical in any way; It’s a kind of laugh that shouldn’t be taken too seriously. There are also many points that need to be measured. Please don’t hate us too much for the conclusion we’ve reached, but of course you can protect the honour of either club or let us know where we went wrong in the comments. We’re big, we can face it.
Let’s go. . .
Barcelona and Madrid are two institutions, but like any club, they are also explained through their fans.
This category is confusing due to the fact that both groups are undergoing extensive renovations to their stadiums. Barcelona’s iconic Camp Nou stadium is being demolished and remodeled into a 105,000-seat stadium, while Madrid is putting the finishing touches on the new, state-of-the-art Santiago Bernabeu. , which is expected to charge them at least €1. 4 billion.
Barcelona play their matches at the Lluís Companys Olympic Stadium while the works on the Camp Nou are being carried out. Many season ticket holders have opted not to attend matches there, but as the season is not over yet, we have to take an average attendance of more than the last five non-Covid affected seasons and divide it by the maximum capacity of each stadium to see how much of their pitch, each team has a tendency to fill up.
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Madrid has played with a small number of fans at various times in recent seasons as it renovated the 84,744-seat Bernabeu. This is contributing to the sharp drop in attendance between 2018-19 and 2019-20. The stadium is expected to be officially inaugurated between the end of May and the beginning of June this year, after several setbacks.
Barcelona plan to return to the Camp Nou in November 2024 at two-thirds capacity. They had a dwindling crowd for two seasons before Xavi’s side drew an impressive average of 83,498 enthusiasts in their quest to win the 2022-23 title, their first La Liga victory. Four years. This gives them an advantage over Madrid, with 67. 4 per cent of the Camp Nou full over the five seasons, compared to 63. 9 per cent for their rivals.
We’ve included another category to reflect the old attendance: the highest figures ever recorded by either club. In April 1956, Madrid drew 129,690 fans to the Bernabéu for the first leg of the European Cup semi-finals against AC Milan. Barcelona’s all-time record of 120,000, set in the first leg of the European Cup quarter-finals against Juventus in March 1986.
Result: one point for Barcelona for average attendance as a percentage of maximum capacity, one point for Real Madrid for attendance ever recorded.
It’s hard to measure the fan base of a club, say two of this size, that has millions of followers around the world.
To reflect this outreach, we’ve chosen to divide it into 3 categories: social media platforms, Spanish-language fanbase, and global fanbase. Our 2020 study of English clubs used Facebook, Twitter and Instagram fans to measure the clubs’ social media footprint. , however, we included TikTok given the platform’s expansion since then.
We also wanted to show how popular those groups are in Spain. The culture of supporters’ clubs – groups of official supporters’ clubs that have express bars where they meet and rarely have a stadium domain reserved – is unique to Spanish football. According to the lists published on the websites of both clubs, there are more than 3,000 penalties from Barcelona and Madrid throughout the country.
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These teams have also spread all over the world. Barcelona has official clubs in Kosovo, Kuwait and seven in Cuba, while Madrid has two teams in Nepal alone. There are 12 Barcelona penalties in the United States compared to 17 in Madrid.
Madrid are the most sensible on all those indicators, with 39. 2 million more fans on social media, almost 1,000 more Spanish supporters’ clubs and 55 more teams around the world. All of these figures are accurate at the beginning of January.
Result: Two points to Real Madrid — one for social media platforms and one for fanbase in Spain and across the world
They are the two most successful clubs in Spain in terms of trophies won, but they sought to differentiate between Champions League titles and less illustrious honours such as the Copa de Ciudades de Feria.
That’s why we’ve set up a question system, awarding 10 for each Champions League title, up to 3 for the Club World Cup, the Spanish Super Cup and the European Super Cup. We don’t have to come with trophies that no longer exist, such as the regional tournaments prior to the creation of La Liga and the Intercontinental Cup.
Madrid’s impressive record in the Champions League and La Liga (they are the festival record holders with 14 and 35 titles respectively) puts them above Barcelona, but that’s another story from the last 20 seasons. . .
Result: Real Madrid A
In addition to the historic success, we seek to reflect the recent titles of those teams. We use trophies won in the last 20 seasons (from 2004 to 2005 inclusive) to weight the scoring formula described in the previous section.
Despite Madrid’s five Champions League trophies won in this time — including four in five years from 2014-2018 — Barcelona have the upper hand thanks to their La Liga and Copa del Rey performance. They have won five more league titles than Madrid in this time and four more Spanish Cups. By contrast, Madrid’s victory in the Copa del Rey last year was only their third in 30 years.
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Result: One point to Barcelona
Barcelona and Madrid regularly finish first and second in La Liga, with Valencia (2001-02 and 2003-04) and Atletico Madrid (2013-14 and 2020-21) the only other champions in the 21st century.
We tracked the league ratings of Barcelona and Madrid over the 91 seasons of La Liga from its inception in 1928-29 (the league was suspended from 1936 to 1939 during the Spanish Civil War), then took an average for each team. Madrid finished a tenth higher than their Catalan rivals (an average position of 2. 7 to 2. 8).
Since 2004, no team has finished in the top three, illustrating the duopoly at the top of Spanish football.
Result: One point to Real Madrid
The Champions League is Europe’s premier club competition, so we try to give it special importance, with a point awarded for maximum appearances and maximum times won.
It is not surprising to see Madrid as the record holder (14 titles) and participations (43) in the European Cup/Champions League. They have played and won the most games (482 and 291) and are the only team to have scored more than 1,000 goals at the festival (1,063).
Even so, Barcelona’s five trophies won compare favourably to their 27 appearances in the tournament. They won it three times in six years from 2006-2011 but had not reached the knockout stages for three years until this season.
Result: One point for Real Madrid for maximum wins and maximum appearances
In 2020, we measured the quality of English club players based on the England internationals they had provided, as well as the number of representatives they had at the 2018 World Cup. But many of Barcelona and Madrid’s most productive players were born outdoors. Spain, so judging those clubs by the Spanish internationals they produced didn’t seem fair.
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We’ve replaced that measure with Ballon d’Or winners: no player at the club has won the award more times than Barcelona and Madrid’s joint record of 12. This is largely due to Messi and Ronaldo’s dominance in the 21st century, so we limited ourselves to individual players who had won the Ballon d’Or on both sides.
But the World Cup remains the pinnacle for many players and a decent gauge of player quality, so we combined this figure with the number of players each side sent to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar and took an average.
Madrid has eight Ballon d’Or winners (Di Stéfano, Raymond Kopa, Luis Figo, Ronaldo Nazario, Fabio Cannavaro, Cristiano Ronaldo, Luka Modric and Karim Benzema) compared to Barcelona’s six (the Spaniards Luis Suárez, Cruyff, Hristo Stoichkov , Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and Messi). But the Catalan club sent 17 players to Qatar, the most of any club, giving them a narrow victory.
Result: A for Barcelona
Barcelona and Madrid don’t just succeed on the pitch: they’re advertising heavyweights. Although the former’s monetary woes are well documented, they remain two of the most lucrative clubs in Europe.
Deloitte’s Football Money League ranks the world’s highest-generation football clubs by measuring a club’s commercial, broadcast and matchday revenue. We took an average figure for each team over the last five years of the report.
Madrid finished second in the most recent edition, with revenue worth €713.8million, while Barcelona fell from fourth to seventh in the list despite making €638.2m. Barcelona have pulled a series of financial ‘levers’ — selling future revenue streams for upfront payments — over the past two years to sign or register players despite their precarious situation.
By contrast, the renovation of the Bernabeu does not seem to have impacted Madrid too much, with their revenue only dropping below €700m for two years in 2020 and 2021. But there is little to separate the teams over the past five years of Deloitte’s report.
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Result: A for Real Madrid
The two Spaniards have a unique force of attraction when it comes to transfers. Being able to attract the world’s biggest stars remains a source of immense pride for fans.
To measure this, we counted each team’s appearances on the list of the 50 most expensive signings, according to the Transfermarkt website. It’s not surprising to see Madrid come out with the utmost sense given their history of ‘galactic’ signings, but the difference as pronounced as one might think.
Madrid are on the list seven times (Eden Hazard, Jude Bellingham, Gareth Bale, Cristiano Ronaldo, Aurélien Tchouameni, Zinedine Zidane and James Rodríguez). Meanwhile, six of Barcelona’s signings are among the 50 most sensible; Not all of them have succeeded. (Phillippe Coutinho, Ousmane Dembele, Antoine Griezmann, Neymar, Frenkie de Jong and Luis Suárez).
Result: Real Madrid A
This is a category in which there is no comparison. Despite comparing themselves to the men’s groups of Barcelona and Madrid, fans of both clubs are proud of their women’s groups, although Madrid has only had one since 2020.
Barcelona’s women are currently the protective champions of the Champions League and make up the bulk of those who won Spain’s first Women’s World Cup last summer. Barcelona have won every game against Madrid and beat them 5-0 in their last meeting in November. .
We’ve used a scoring formula similar to the previous “important titles” sections; In reality, this is rarely very mandatory given the disparity between teams.
The most obvious way of settling this debate. Barcelona and Madrid’s men’s teams have met 255 times in all competitions, with 103 wins for Madrid and 100 for Barcelona. Madrid have scored 426 goals in Clasicos compared to 416 for Barcelona.
Carlo Ancelotti’s side won the last game at Montjuic in October thanks to two goals from Bellingham, but last year’s Clasico sealed the league well for Barcelona: a 2-1 win with a late goal from Franck Kessie.
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Xavi spoke of last season’s Spanish Super Cup win over Madrid as a turning point for his team. He hopes that this final can deliver that after a torrid first part of the season.
Result: One point to Real Madrid
So the effects are there and. . . Real Madrid is bigger than Barcelona. Well, at least by our measurements.
Again, we must emphasize that this is far from scientific. Barcelona enthusiasts would say that they have a more productive academy than Madrid’s and greater social success – two things we haven’t explored in this article.
Either way, the two clubs will be battling it out for the Super Cup and much more when they meet on Sunday. As with El Clasico, it’s much more than just a game when it comes to those teams.
(Top photos: Getty Images)