The first Real Madrid vs. Barcelona match of the 2017-18 season is Saturday at the Bernabeu. While this fixture has been dominated by the Messi vs. Ronaldo debate for the last decade, there’s another matchup that pops into people’s minds: El Clasico vs Super Bowl. Which has higher TV ratings?
Real Madrid welcomes Barcelona to the Santiago Bernabeu on Saturday, December 23, for the 175th league edition of El Clasico. The stakes couldn’t be higher with Real desperate to make up ground in La Liga, while a victory for Barcelona at the home of its greatest rival would effectively doom Zinedine Zidane’s men in their quest to defend the title.
If there’s one goal to summarize Barcelona’s 2017-18 La Liga season thus far, it’s this one from the club’s 4-0 defeat of Deportivo on Sunday — it even starts with a poor touch from Luis Suarez, something the Uruguayan has been uncharacteristically guilty of on a number of occasions this season.
However, that touch is followed by a sensational 14-pass move from Barca and finished by Suarez, giving him six goals in his last five league games, so the striker is really beyond criticism right now.
It’s not football’s best kept secret, but Atletico Madrid manager Diego Simeone has confirmed that much like Radamel Falcao and Diego Costa before him, 26-year-old center forward Antoine Griezmann will be allowed to leave the club for “a once in a lifetime chance to play for a certain team.”
Lionel Messi was never a little-known quantity. When he scored nearly 500 goals for Newell’s Old Boys as a young boy, people took notice. That’s why Barcelona made the highly unusual decision to sign a 13-year-old foreign player. That’s why, aged 17 years, three months and 22 days, he became Barcelona’s youngest-ever representative in an official competition. It’s why he represented La Albiceleste, the two-time world champions, at 18.
A meeting between third and fifth in La Liga turned into a rout inside the first half with Real Madrid racing to a 5-0 lead on Sevilla inside the match’s opening 42 minutes. Nacho got the first, Cristiano Ronaldo added a brace on the day his fifth Ballon d’Or trophy was presented to the Bernabeu crowd, Toni Kroos struck the fourth and 19-year-old Achraf Hakimi scored his first La Liga goal for the club.