Here’s an honest question: By what metric do we measure just how GOOD a sports club is? If you’re an American like I am, you can easily take a stab at it by saying it’s the team that won the most recent title. That makes it nice and simple and definitive. But even in this country, a lot of fans argue that that best team is frequently not the one that takes home the trophy. There are many cases and arguments to be made about teams that happened to get VERY lucky. The New York Giants pummeled their way to winning the Super Bowl in 2007 not by being the best team per se, but simply by being the better team in the moments that counted. (The Helmet Catch was once in a lifetime; in 99 other dimensions, David Tyree coughed up the ball.) The 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers did the impossible when their Finals opponents, the Golden State Warriors, let up and gave Lebron James a hair of extra space. The 2006 St Louis Cardinals played on and off through the regular season, but hit the ON button in the playoffs and taped it down.
In European soccer, the proper answer to the question of how good a sports club is even murkier. The league titles are given to the team with the best record, but every league has two or three elimination tournaments which are played concurrently but outside of the regular season standings. In American terms, those would probably be considered conference championships that are awarded but don’t come with the sting of losing the proper championship. Also, every country has a domestic league, and the level of quality and how much money they all bring in are also factors. That means there are some clubs that run circles all around their domestic leagues but are nonfactors in the Champions’ League. One of the most dominant and popular clubs in Europe is Rangers Football Club of the Scottish Professional Football League. Rangers has won 55 league championships, 34 Scottish Cups, 27 Scottish League Cups, and a Scottish Challenge Cup. Those numbers are so absurd that your video game console would QUICKLY run out of memory space if you tried to replicate them in this year’s FIFA. But that hasn’t translated to a whole lot of international success. They’ve won a UEFA Super Cup, a pair of Europa League Cups, and something called a European Cup Winners’ Cup in some tournament that doesn’t even exist anymore. Rangers’ archrivals, Celtic Football Club, don’t have QUITE as many local accolades. But Celtic DID win the Champions’ League back in 1967, and their supporters still lord that over Rangers fans.
If you’re a new visitor to this site who only made their way here through my Manchester United piece, you may be wondering what this has to do with anything. Yes, I’m always this long-winded. But the point I’m trying to make is that in spite of constant bar arguments and thinkpieces about how good one soccer team is over another, Real Madrid Club de Futbal is constantly listed among the best soccer clubs in the world. Their dominance over their proper league, La Liga of Spain, is absurd. Their dominance over the best clubs in Europe is absurd. Their wealth is absurd. The number and power of the many superstars they’ve employed is absurd. Yes, this is a club rich in history, and they have their proper icons and big moments like anyone, but Real Madrid – Los Blancos – is so consistently good that even their most important and popular icons can be written off as less club leaders and more of players who happened to play there once.
Real Madrid began with a school called the Institucion Libre de Ensenanza, which popped up in Spain and existed from 1876 to 1936. A lot of the students there happened to be graduates of Cambridge and Oxford, THE big two universities in England and two of the bigs on the world educational stage. The English students there were the ones who introduced soccer to the place when they created a club called Sky in 1897. After playing on Sunday mornings in Moncloa for three years, they split into two clubs: New Foot-Ball de Madrid and Madrid Football Club. New Foot-Ball de Madrid moved on to whatever fate awaited a European university sports squad. As for Madrid Football Club, they elected a new board on March 6, 1902, presided by a man named Juan Padros. Juan and his brother Carlos looked at sports as less of a leisure activity and more of a universal community truth which could and should be accessible to anyone and everyone. So they brought together a bunch of other soccer enthusiasts and met them in the backroom of their family business and formally turned their little university team into an official entity. They set a membership fee, officialized the name of Madrid Football Club, and created their iconic all-white uniforms, which were a tribute to club in England called Corinthian FC which was apparently rather famous at the time. Padros had apparently met them at some point in his travels.
Back then, the only nationwide soccer competition in Spain was the Copa del Ray, and Madrid Football Club won it by 1905. After that, they reeled in the following three as well. There’s no information on Wikipedia which goes into any great detail about the period afterward, except to say that Madrid Football Club lost a match to a group of clergymen in 1907 6-2 and that they moved to a stadium called Campo de O’Donnell in 1912, and it isn’t until the 20’s when we start to see a pair of significant events: In 1920, Madrid Football Club changed its name to Real Madrid CF, and in 1929, the Spanish Football League was created. The full name of the league is pretty bulky: Campeonato Nacional de Liga de Primera Division. So Spaniards tend to shorten that mouthful to just the Primera Division, and the English-speaking world refers to it as La Liga. And the Blancos jumped out in front of all the other clubs in the league right off the bat and stayed out in front until the end of the season… When a loss to Athletic Bilbao let FC Barcelona leapfrog right over them and into their title! Real Madrid won its first title in 1932, and repeated the following year.
1931 also saw a major upheaval in Spain. That was the year the Second Spanish Republic was formed, and Real Madrid went back to calling themselves Madrid Football Club for the next several years. The Second Spanish Republic, however, didn’t sit very well with a lot of the people who lived in Spain. This isn’t an event in history that Americans are especially aware of – they teach us mainly about the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany and the rise of the Third Reich and how the countries of Europe tried to avoid a new war by appeasing the Nazis. We sort of forget that Spain was just sitting there, all cool, trying to sort out its own mess. The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 and ended in 1939 with the victory of Francisco Franco. Franco was one of the bad guys – he sent troops to fight for the Nazis, though it was only on the strict condition that his troops fight against the Soviet Union and ONLY the Soviet Union and NOT against other Western European countries. Otherwise, Spain stayed out of World War II since the country wasn’t exactly united and the military was too beat up. Soccer continued during World War II, and in 1943, Real Madrid beat Barcelona 11-1 during the Copa del Ray second leg (renamed the Copa del Generalisimo at the time for Franco). Barcelona had defeated Madrid 3-0 in the first leg in Barcelona. The Blancos had complained about all three goals against them, and they also accused the referee of letting both FC Barcelona and their fans get away with using roughhouse tactics against them. A local newspaper accused the fans of whistling as a show of “clear intention to attack the representatives of Spain.” It was so bad that Barca fans were forbidden to travel to Madrid for the second leg, and Madrid’s supporters returned the abuse their club had endured in Catalonia. One of Barcelona’s players thought the whole thing was a setup, so what came of it was Barcelona (possibly) fighting back the only way they could: By basically not showing up. While the 11-1 result is something that Madrid’s supporters actually seem ashamed of now, it painted the everlasting picture of Real Madrid being the team of the evil dictator and Barcelona being the victim. It also created a fierce rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona which has existed ever since.
Santiago Bernabeu was born in Almansa in 1895, and his family moved to Madrid while he was very young. As a kid, he was a regular at Real Madrid’s matches, and when he was 14 years old, the club accepted him into his junior ranks. That began an official association with Real Madrid which lasted over 70 years, until Bernabeu’s death in 1978. Over the course of that time, Bernabeu would reach the first team in 1911 and play for them until 1926, save for a yearlong stint with Atletico Madrid during the 1920-1921 season. After retiring as a player, he managed the club for a year. He also served as director and as a club maintenance person (I don’t know what that means in this context, but I think it’s safe to say he wasn’t picking up trash and sweeping). But it was in 1943 when Bernabeu was elected club president and tasked with rebuilding everything after the Spanish Civil War. Bernabeu began his tenure by reorganizing and restructuring every part of the club at every level. He made sure everything had a technical team and a recruiting staff of its own, and he founded the club’s youth academy in 1953.
1953 was also the first year Bernabeu started a campaign of signing all the world-class players he could get ahold of, whether they were from Spain or not. His big prize doing this was Alfredo di Stefano, who was from Argentina. And with the youth academy bringing up talent and his attempt to sign the best players country be damned, Real Madrid’s most iconic players started to appear: Ferenc Puskas, Francisco Gento, Hector Real, Raymond Kopa, Jose Santamaria, Miguel Munoz, Amancio, and Santillana. It was also during this time when Real Madrid truly established itself as The Force With Whom All Must Reckon in both Spanish and European soccer. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article about Real Madrid’s history is afflicted with a major problem that affects a lot of the other teams I’ve covered: Sparsity. I’m being forced to expand this essay through creative wordplay because the Wikipedia history is covering entire decades using single sentences. So I don’t have any details to give about Santiago Bernabeu’s years, except that he ran the club for almost 35 years. He died in 1978, and during his time, the Blancos brought home a haul of one Intercontinental Cup, six European Cups, 16 La Liga titles, six Copa del Reys, two Latin Cups, and a Copa Eva Duarte. Those two final trophies are from competitions that don’t even exist anymore.
Bernabeu was replaced by an interim president who soon called for an election. The club treasurer, Luis de Carlos, decided to resign his post in the hope of winning the BIG promotion. And lo and behold, he DID win the BIG promotion! He won it on a technicality, at any rate – the election was called off because while de Carlos submitted 3352 documents which endorsed his presidency, his ostensible running opponents didn’t get their own minimum required numbers of documents in on time. Which meant the presidency automatically went to de Carlos. The Blancos got things going again in 1980 by winning a double: The league title and the Copa del Rey. The Copa del Rey was a weird little contest that year because Real Madrid ended up having to play against their own reserve team, Real Madrid Castilla, in the final. Although I’m sure that raised a few eyebrows, Castilla DID legitimately earn its place in the final by beating four First Division teams to get that far in the first place. Unfortunately, the rest of de Carlos’s years presiding over Real Madrid didn’t bring that level of triumph again. They reeled in the 1981-82 Copa del Rey, but that was it. In 1981 the club lost the league title right at the end of the season and dropped the European Cup final against Liverpool.
In 1985, it was apparently time to elect a new club president. That meant Luis de Carlos had to prepare a campaign for the position again, and in doing that, he brought club legend Alfredo di Stefano back into the fold to manage. To sweeten the deal, he also invited back another club legend, Amancio, to manage Real Madrid Castilla. Don’t ask me how Amancio did because I don’t have any information about that. Di Stefano, though, proved to be a dud, and de Carlos decided not to renew his contract when it ran out. And I guess the club’s electors didn’t accept what de Carlos brought to Real Madrid, because he was voted out in 1985 in favor of former club director Ramon Mendoza. And in Mendoza’s era, the club took on the nickname “La Quinta del Buitre” – Vulture’s Cohort, a nickname for striker Emilio Butragueno, one of Real Madrid’s stars and the most charismatic person on the team. Butragueno, though, was only one of a great core of players which included Manolo Sanchis, Martin Vazquez, Michel, and Miguel Pardeza. Although Pardeza ended up leaving the club pretty early (in 1986), those five players are credited with bringing Real Madrid back to the top of the standings in La Liga and turning them into one of the best clubs in Europe. Now, that doesn’t mean they were perfect. This powerhouse somehow kept failing in the European Cup, and they proved to be a regular welcome mat for a powerful AC Milan side in international matches. But it did win a pair of UEFA Cups and five championships in a row. Sadly, though, even the best clubs have their down periods, and the big five stars of this particular edition of Real Madrid started to disperse in the early 90’s. Pardeza, as mentioned, was barely there to even START this dynasty, even though he’s credited with being a part of it. Vazquez played a brief stint with Torino FC from 1990 to 1992, returned, then walked away for Deportivo de La Coruna in 1995. Butragueno was gone in 1995 and spent three years with Mexican club Atletico Celaya before retiring, and Michel went to the same place the next year. Of the five, only Manolo Sanchis spent his entire career with Real Madrid. He retired in 2001, and in doing so, he became the only player from those years to hoist that elusive European Cup. In fact, he was there long enough to do that twice, in 1998 and 2000.
Real Madrid’s run during the 90’s was turbulent and unstable. Well, you know, it was as turbulent and unstable as a team which wins two league titles, a Copa del Rey, and a European Cup in that span of time can be, anyway. They had another change of the club presidency in 1995, but that also brought on a period where the Blancos managed to hire seven managers in three years. At the very least, they managed to develop and eventually call up a certain young forward by the name of Raul, who became the club’s face and leader for the next 16 years and 550 appearances. But it was in 2000 when one of the club’s presidential candidates, Florentino Perez, ran his campaign on the sort of traditional path of making insanely grandiose promises. Perez’s promise was Barcelona star Luis Figo. Perez won his election, and 10 days later, he managed to deliver on getting Figo to wear the famous blanco kit. Unfortunately, that delivery came at the expense of longtime idol Fernando Redondo, who was shipped off to AC Milan with a ton of controversy. And while Figo was indeed a star, some of the club higher-ups decided that they needed more than one star. They needed the whole fucking galaxy! So the Blancos also went and signed Claude Makelele, Albert Celades, Flavio Conceicao, Cesar Sanchez, Pedro Munitis, and Santiago Solari. With that roster, Real Madrid were Galacticos!
Expectations were naturally as high as the stars themselves, and when Real Madrid saw its first real test in the 2000 UEFA Super Cup, it… Tripped and fell, losing 2-1 to Galatasaray. After that, one of the club’s forwards ended up getting injured. That was followed by an el Classico loss, which in turn was followed by a Copa del Rey elimination against Toledo, a team on the FIFTH level of the Spanish soccer pyramid. The club did recover and make it to the top of the table, but they took as much of a humiliating spill as is probably possible for a title club. No matter, though. The club kept bringing up the big stars: Guti, Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane, and David Beckham all joined the club at some point during the aughties. The club turned into a revolving door of big names, and in the space of the entire decade, Real Madrid won four titles, three Spanish Super Cups, and two European Cups. And… Okay, honestly, the Wikipedia history at this point starts to really blend together. Yes, stars came in and out, managers came and went, but Real Madrid never truly fell off from its pedestal as one of the greatest clubs in the world. After the aughties, they won four more titles, two Copa del Reys, four Spanish Super Cups, and five European Cups, including a classic in 2019 which left me – as a Liverpool fan – pretty frustrated.
That’s a very generalized summary of Real Madrid’s history. Now let’s go over the trophies they’ve won, shall we? So, 35 league titles to start with. As far as the total number of domestic league titles goes, 35 is a big number. It’s not the most – Los Blancos is bested by Rangers of the Scottish League (55), a Northern Ireland club called Linfield which I had never even heard of until literally just now (also 55), Celtic of the Scottish League (50), Greece’s Olympiacos (46), and Portuguese club Benfica (37). If you’re only counting the BIG leagues, then you can axe all those guys, but Juventus of Italy’s Serie A won 36 in THEIR league. After them, the only other club which surpasses 30 titles is Bayern Munich of Germany’s Bundesliga. Anyway, Real Madrid augments their case with a solid 19 Copa del Reys. The Copa del Rey is the oldest club competition in Spain, and Real Madrid’s haul is third in La Liga; they’re surpassed by 31-time champion Barcelona and 23-time champion Athletic Bilbao. The Spanish Super Cup is relatively new – it was created just in 1982, and it was contested by only two clubs until 2018, when the competition expanded to four. Real Madrid won the Spanish Super Cup 12 times, which is better than any other club except 13-time winner Barcelona.
If there’s a great measure of exactly how good Real Madrid is, though, it’s probably the European Cup. The European Cup is the most prestigious club trophy in Europe. And not only has Real Madrid brought home that bit of hardware more than anyone, they also blow the others right out of the water. They have been the Champions’ League tournament winners 14 times. That’s damn impressive in its own right, but it becomes even more impressive when you see that the runner-up in Champions’ League titles, Italy’s AC Milan, won it “only” seven times. They also won two Europa League titles. That’s a contest which Atletico Madrid and Sevilla have both been more successful in; Sevilla, in fact, is the most successful club in that competition at all. But only five Spanish clubs have ever won it! Real Madrid is also the most successful club in the UEFA Super Cup. They’ve won it five times. The luster of that is removed by the fact that they share that success record with Barcelona and AC Milan, but just a little. After all, Barcelona and AC Milan are both on European soccer’s A-list as well.
Since numbers aren’t retired in European soccer and Halls of Fame are bullshit, what I’m doing is visiting the club pages and looking at the rosters of club legends, if they’re available. Real Madrid’s is available. It’s also, uh, extensive. VERY extensive. Really, there has to be around 200 players on it. There are 20 pages or so. They include Raul, who was the club’s shining star when soccer first started taking up space on my radar. Raul was the undisputed leader of Los Blancos from 1992 to 2010, scoring 323 goals in 741 matches. He led the club to three European Cups, two Intercontinental Cups, a European Super Cup, six La Liga championships, and four Spanish Super Cups. The first major European soccer transfer I ever saw in my hometown American newspaper was David Beckham’s transfer to Real Madrid from Manchester United. Beckham was only there for a few years and he only put up 20 goals, but the club’s legends page makes it clear that he was beloved among both supporters and teammates, and that his impact on the club went beyond just goals. Ronaldo is also on the list… Ronaldo Luis Nazario de Lima, that is! A Brazilian whom the page describes as “endowed with physical attributes and skill only available to those truly blessed,” THIS Ronaldo played from 2002 to 2007, lighting up the scoreboard 104 times in 177 matches, being a keystone of two La Liga titles, an Intercontinental Cup, and a Spanish Super Cup, and a memorable cameo on The Simpsons. One player who is NOT listed among the club legends is Ronaldo’s evil counterpart, Cristiano Ronaldo. Cristiano Ronaldo was considered the best in the world for the better part of a decade, and he played the bulk of his career for Los Blancos, scoring a whopping 311 goals in just 292 matches. One may be tempted to attribute the fact that he’s missing to a page which is only sporadically updated and the fact that his career ran relatively later – Ronaldo played from 2009 to 2018 and is still playing the sport. But there’s another player listed among the club legends, Raphael Varane, who played from 2011 to 2021, so that’s not it. So one may assume that Cristiano Ronaldo, a world-class asshole with an ego to match his talent, must have pissed off too many of the wrong people. That would be perfectly in character for him. As of this writing, Manchester United just released him from his second contract with the club after he bitched at Piers Morgan about them for three hours. Just a few days ago, the Portugal National Team – on which he has long been a starting staple – demolished Switzerland 6-1 in the 2022 World Cup while he sat on the bench and watched as a substitute.
You can’t talk about Real Madrid without bringing up THE greatest rivalry in sports in the entire world: El Clasico! El Clasico is any match played between Real Madrid and their legendary rivals, Barcelona. Matches between the two clubs are among the most-viewed sporting events in the world among fans of the sport. On the pitch, El Clasico is known for its great display of talent, its intensity, and memorable goal celebrations which frequently mock the other club. (As opposed to frequent whining from American players and coaches about “RESPECTING THE GAME!” because opposing players celebrated too hard and hurt their feelings.) El Clasico is fairly evenly contested – both clubs are regularly among the world’s richest, so they can both afford pretty much any player they’re after, and European soccer doesn’t have a salary cap. Naturally, the all-time record is close: Real Madrid leads it 101-97, and there have been 57 draws. On social media, Real Madrid and Barcelona are the most-followed sports clubs in the world, and they’re the only two clubs in La Liga to have never been relegated. The intensity of El Clasico comes from something Americans insist is outside of sports but which, in truth, runs hand in hand with sports: Politics. I can’t even begin to go into detail about this, but the EXTREME nutshell version dates back to the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Barcelona’s region, Catalonia, has a very strong cultural identity which is considered different from the rest of Spain. After Franco crushed the Second Spanish Republic, the first thing he did was nationalize the country to create a unified Spanish identity. Catalonia was the big outlier that kept its head up and thumbed its nose at Franco, so FC Barcelona became a symbol of defiance while Real Madrid became the chosen club of Franco’s followers. Like I said, though, that’s the version the world outside Spain knows. In fact, a lot of what we know about this rivalry is exaggerated by the clubs themselves; most historians are almost certain that Francisco Franco didn’t even have a favorite club. But the myths persist, and they honestly add a little bit of depth to the lore of both the country and the sport.
Does Real Madrid Club de Futbal sound like it’s for you? I can’t blame you there. They’ve had an unparalleled amount of success. They’ve never been bad enough to be kicked off the top tier of Spanish soccer. As a fan, you’ll have plenty of company – Los Blancos has 112 MILLION followers on Facebook, which is more than any other sports team, anywhere. And I’m pretty sure it’s the most followed THING anywhere, ever. In researching that, I’ve entered the names of quite a few things which could conceivably have more followers and came up empty. For comparison, Manchester United has 75 million followers, and they’re the most popular team in the world’s most popular sports league. If you want to bring American sports into it, the most popular sports team in the United States is the Los Angeles Lakers, and their 21 million Facebook followers is just pithy compared to any of that! The is a great club to follow if you want THE very best of everything a sport could offer – drama, history, fantastic athleticism, visibility, and a fighting chance in any match.
Pros
Everyone in the damn world knows them; there’s a good chance they’ll win any match you see them play; their style is the typical Spanish style, which means offense based in fluidity and grace; half of the greatest sports rivalry in the world; can and just might get their hands on your favorite player from another club at SOME point
Cons
That association with Franco ain’t going anywhere; you’ll want to stockpile stain remover if you wear one of those all-white jerseys; once employed Cristiano Ronaldo and even they don’t seem too fond of him; have an average ticket price Roger fucking Goodell would be proud of
Should you be a fan?
You may have a few reservations about pulling for a club that haters like to associate with Francisco Franco. (And he DID rule until his death, in the fucking 1970’s… That’s frighteningly recent.) But just remember this: That association is overblown. Real Madrid CF is the Lakers, Yankees, and Montreal Canadiens all rolled into a convenient package in the world’s most popular sport.
everyteamever 