Soccer in Spain is defined by the rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona. It's what stirs Spanish hearts (one study found that some 57 percent of Spaniards support either Real or Barça), captivates the world's imagination (El Clásico is hands down the biggest rivalry match on the planet), and therefore drives the attention, passion, and economics that are the lifeblood of the sport. What Spanish soccer is, it is in large part directly due to Real and Barça.
As should be evident by now, the men's and women's sides of the sport are two inextricably linked aspects of the same entity. Much of the history of women's soccer can be told by measuring the gap between the two at any given point in time, success always found in the places where the chasm wasn't quite as wide as elsewhere. The future of the sport is in shrinking that margin further still.
As such, Spain's Liga F has long been a two-horse race missing one of its horses. Barcelona over the past decade has held up its end of the bargain, investing heavily in its women's team and reaping considerable rewards. Barça Femení utterly dominates its domestic competition, enjoys a long and enduring reign as the queens of Europe, owns the Ballon d'Or, provided the Spanish national team with the bulk of the resources with which it conquered the world, and because of all that has become the first truly iconic club team of the still-nascent global women's soccer boom. Real Madrid, in contrast, has been practically non-existent. The most popular and powerful club in world soccer didn't even have a women's team until 2020, when, after an avalanche of complaints over the years about its shameless disregard of the sport, the club bought newly promoted CD TACÓN and changed its kit. But even with a women's team in name, nothing about Real Madrid Femenino embodies what it is to be Real Madrid.
Las Blancas have never won anything—never even come close. They may be the second-best team in Liga F, but that's a little like being the second-fastest swimmer in a distance race against Katie Ledecky. In the four seasons the club has been called Real Madrid, the team has finished on average 21 points behind the Blaugrana, notching an annual goal difference an average of 97 goals worse than the Catalans. In the all-important Clásicos, coming into this past weekend Barça had won every single one of the 18 editions, scoring 66 goals and conceding just seven.
In itself, it's no disgrace to fall short in direct competition with arguably the greatest women's soccer team ever assembled. Real Madrid is still a baby in this game, and if we put aside the entirely indefensible delay in starting a women's team, it would be harsh to castigate a baby for failing to defeat a full-grown Amazonian warrior. But the club's problem isn't the losing. It's the not caring.
The only explanation for how a team called Real Madrid could get smashed to hell in Clásico after Clásico for five years straight is if the people in charge do not give a damn. All the evidence supports this. It is true that Madrid has spent real money to put together a legitimately enviable squad. But the money belies the total absence of any plan or ambition behind it.
At the helm of this roster is Alberto Toril, a woefully inadequate coach who has managed to keep his job despite overseeing the vast majority of these Barça blowouts, combined with consistently underwhelming Champions League campaigns, in his four seasons in charge. Florentino Pérez, the club's famously demanding and impatient president, apparently has never been bothered by the nonstop procession of embarrassments from the only women's team manager he's ever hired.
To be fair, it's possible Pérez isn't really aware of how the women's team has fared over the years. Nothing indicates that he pays much attention to what the women's soccer section of his club does. The president has attended only a single Clásico in person, a 4-0 Barça win in Nov. 2022. And unlike most of the other top teams in Europe, Real has not once deigned to host a women's match in its men's team's stadium. Madrid newbie Melanie Leupolz recently said on a podcast that she asked Pérez when Las Blancas would be allowed to play in the Bernabéu, and he told her only when the team wins a trophy first. (Somewhat relatedly, Leupolz tore her MCL during last week's Champions League match against Arsenal while playing on a disastrously unkempt home pitch, the status of which Ian Wright called a "disgrace." Yet another example of how little the club cares about the team.)
Pérez's and the club's leadership's total complacency stands in direct opposition to the team's aspirations to not just win, but to exemplify Real Madrid in a way that goes deeper than the white jerseys alone. The one-sided Clásico defeats, the mealy-mouthed rationalizations from Toril about why it would be unfair to expect anything more, the absence of any repercussions or even just frustration at the enduring gap between the two teams—all of it only served as obstacles preventing Real from realizing its potential to truly compete with Barcelona. A team is first a story that it foretells for itself and then sets out to realize. And Real Madrid has never told itself it should so much as compete with Barça. This has robbed Madrid's numerous great players of an environment worthy of their talents, robbed Madrid fans of a women's team of the stature they deserve, and robbed all of Spanish soccer what should be one of the biggest driving forces for the growth of the sport.
Belatedly, blessedly, randomly, there's a chance that the past week could be the beginning of a new era. On Sunday, in front of more than 35,000 fans in Barcelona's Montjuic Olympic Stadium, in the 19th Clásico, Real Madrid finally beat Barça, 3-1. It's worth pointing out that this was almost a complete accident. Though Real came into the match trailing Barça by only seven points in the Liga F table, they had all but conceded the title race already. The weekend prior, the Blancas started an exaggeratedly rotated side in a home match against Deportivo La Coruña, putting all its eggs in the Champions League basket ahead of a midweek quarterfinal match against Arsenal. The ploy more or less worked. The backup-heavy Madrid could only manage a 2-2 draw with Depor, but its rested starters helped earn an impressive 2-0 home win against the Gunners.
Real repeated the previous week's plan coming into Sunday's Clásico, again keeping star players like Linda Caicedo, Caroline Weir, and Olga Carmona on the bench, essentially punting on the Barça game in favor of being fresher for the upcoming second leg of the Arsenal tie. (Did I mention this team lacks ambition?) Another Clásico loss, coming off the 8-1 aggregate beatdowns earlier this month in the two-legged Copa de la Reina semifinals, was for the club a fine consolation for giving themselves a better shot at making the Champions League semifinals for the first time ever.
If the strategy to not even really compete in the Clásico was clear from the lineup sheet, the players themselves weren't content to settle for so little. One thing that has marked most previous matches between these two is Real's baffling refusal to even try to play in a way that might actually frustrate Barça. This time was different, almost by necessity. Las Blancas' underpowered starters knew they weren't equipped to challenge Barça's historically great ball retention, and they accepted this, determined to camp out in their own half and fight like hell to resist the onslaught. In the other direction, Real was prepared to bolt up the pitch upon every turnover, always looking to hit space-eaters Athenea del Castillo and Alba Redondo on the counter. It was a simple but effective gameplan, which was a shock to everyone who has rightfully expected only incompetence from Toril. And after Redondo scored a fully deserved opening goal in the 41st minute, the Madridistas' determination to keep up what was working only grew stronger.
Barça wasn't as sharp with the ball as usual all game. The Blaugrana failed to break down Real's low block, and repeatedly lost the ball in compromising areas. Madrid's goal increased the sense of anxiety and haste in Barça's every possession, which made it easier for Real to both thwart the home team's attacks and launch threatening counters in the other direction. Nevertheless, we're still talking about Barcelona here. Even on an off day they remain psychotically dangerous. After Caroline Graham Hansen scored an equalizer in the 67th minute, the feeling was that the same story we'd seen from this matchup 18 times before was about to repeat itself. To their immense credit, though, Las Blancas refused to fold. With Weir and Caicedo subbed on the pitch at about the hour mark, Real's counters were even more fearsome than before, and the defense, led by standout performances from center back Maëlle Lakrar and goalkeeper Misa Rodríguez, dug in. As the match entered its final stages, for once you could make the case that Real actually deserved to come away with something from a Clásico.
For a moment there, it looked like none of that would matter. The Barça attack kept piling on the pressure after Hansen's equalizer, and were rewarded for it in the 81st minute, when Jana Fernández capped a pretty move by poking a deflected Alexia Putellas pass past Rodríguez. But as Fernández and Aitana Bonmatí were celebrating the thrusting of yet another dagger into Madridista hearts, the referee signaled that the goal did not count. Offside was the call, in spite of the fact that the play was definitively, obviously not offside. It was the kind of glaring error that is depressingly common in Liga F, where shoddy refereeing is closer to the rule than the exception. As there is no VAR in the league, the awful call stood, and the match continued.
Minutes later, it was Real who would provide the match with a late climax. Barça's desperate search for a winner left them even more exposed to the quick counters that Real had already been doing damage with. In the 87th minute Caicedo punished Barcelona's defense for all the space it was leaving in behind by chasing after a long ball, racing past substitute defender Ingrid Engen, chopping inside after getting into the Barça box, and squaring the ball for an onrushing Weir, who first-timed the ball home. If it still felt like the traditional order would be restored somewhat with a draw, Real put an end to that with the finisher in the sixth minute of stoppage time, Weir getting herself another by nodding a rebound over the line.
It would be tempting for Barcelona to point to Fernández's disallowed goal as the main culprit for an unjust result, but doing so would be wrong. For the first time ever, Real Madrid simply outplayed Barça in all phases of the game and was the deserving, if fortunate, winner. Likewise, though, it would be tempting for Real to make more of the win than is really there. The distance separating Spain's two big clubs remains enormous. Even while playing a poor game, it took a nightmarish refereeing mistake for Barça to lose its first Clásico. It was probably only Toril's cowardice in putting out a team he didn't even really expect to compete with Barça that created the conditions for the sit-back-and-counter strategy that proved so effective.
But the promise of the win is what it could mean for the future. Empires have been founded on far shakier grounds than this, and that's the kind of thing this win needs to be. I don't think it's a coincidence that this game came after Madrid's leadership, for maybe the first time ever, reportedly expressed serious disappointment with the state of the team coming off the Copa de la Reina debacle. A club like Real Madrid cannot accept being also-rans to Barcelona. Las Blancas must set the standard at being equal to the Blaugrana, they must compete with tooth and claw in Clásicos, and they must hold themselves accountable when progress toward those goals isn't coming fast enough.
It's fitting that it was the players themselves who were most responsible for this history-making, hopefully future-altering victory by surpassing their coach's and club's low expectations and achieving, in under a week, Real's two biggest victories ever. Pérez, Toril, and the rest of the club might not believe Real Madrid Femenino is worthy of the name and the demands that should come with it, but the players do. Though I'm sure the money was good, I have to believe that the allure of turning Real Madrid into Real Madrid played a big part in inspiring the likes of Caicedo and Weir, massive talents coveted by clubs all over the world, to don that iconic white jersey. It's taken too long to get here, but at last Madrid has gotten a taste of the pride and glory that should always be synonymous with this club. It's a feat certainly worth celebrating, but only if it leads to more of this and less of what has come before.
