Spanish football rivalries

The history of association football in the country dates from the 1890s, when the game was introduced to some port cities by British sailors and dock workers, and to other locations by locals who had been to Britain for education or work and had been exposed to the developing sport there.

In those formative decades, the dominant clubs were Athletic Bilbao, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona,[1] a pattern which continued into the early editions of La Liga, the national league which was established in 1929.

The frequent important meetings in the cup and regular league fixtures, as well as each club becoming adopted as a symbol of their respective home regions,[1] caused rivalries to develop between them,[2] with the feud between Barcelona from Catalonia and Real Madrid from Castile, known as El Clásico, now being one of the most watched football matches around the world due to the sustained success of the two teams, who attract global fanbases, possess some of the top playing talent and have stadia which are among the largest in Europe.

[3] In the early 21st century, a significant rivalry developed between the two most prominent forwards in each team, Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo and Argentinian Lionel Messi, who consistently vied to break goalscoring records and win global individual awards in addition to helping their clubs to several major finals, with their mutual levels of performance seldom seen in the past – this added a new element to the matches between them and generated even more attention from media and supporters.

The third team in the original triad of success, Athletic Bilbao from the Basque Country, have fallen far behind in terms of their profile and trophies won due to being based in a smaller city and having a self-imposed restriction limiting themselves to a small pool of players with a connection to their home territory.