This week’s Madrid-Barca drama reignited Clásico rivalry

Florentino Perez will not be going to the Clásico in Barcelona on Saturday. This time there will be no visiting president in the directors’ box alongside all the usual suspects, from former players and footballing figures to bankers, businessmen and politicians. Joan Laporta, the Barcelona president, will have to find someone else to sit next to him. Unless he’s got an inflatable Perez he can use? There will be no formal prematch meal, not this time — and you know it’s serious when someone cancels lunch.

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Real Madrid‘s president took the decision because of a tweet from a Barcelona director, they say. And “they” here is not the club, not directly, and almost never is: these kind of things, which are most things, are better said by others, through the usual channels where someone else’s fingers can get burned.

On Wednesday night during Madrid’s Champions League win over Braga, when Vinícius stood by the touchline, faced an opponent and did a dozen stepovers without actually going anywhere, a Barcelona director who you hadn’t heard of before but probably have heard of now by the name of Mikel Camps wrote: “It isn’t racism. Vinicius deserves a clip round the ear for being a clown and a piss-taker.”

Camps deleted the tweet soon afterward but far too late, and then went silent. Not only is he a director, he is — get this — a spokesperson, but he did not speak and didn’t tweet again either. He pretended it hadn’t happened, because that’ll work. 24 hours went by, and there was nothing.

Before Barcelona’s game in Glasgow the next night, the Barcelona director Rafa Yuste was asked about it; it was, he said, a mistake, an unfortunate and unacceptable tweet that “won’t happen again.”

When Xavi Hernandez was asked about it, as he is asked about so many issues that it shouldn’t be his job to field, Barcelona’s coach said that the fact that Camps had deleted the tweet said it all; it was done. He wasn’t going to be the one to wind up the Clásico.

There was no reprimand of Camps, no removal from his post, no word from him either, and no reason to assume that he will be absent on Saturday, taking up his seat in the directors’ box. In the silence, Perez took a decision, or so it goes: he would not do so, he would not attend the Clásico. This time, it seems, there wasn’t going to be a prematch meal or formal reception anyway, but now there would be no president either.

On Cadena Ser radio station Thursday night, the former Barcelona president, Joan Gaspart, asked: “What does he want, for us to get down on our knees and beg forgiveness? What else do we have to do for him to come to a game that it is his duty to attend?” Gaspart said that he had never missed a Clásico, not even when the police suggested he do so. If Perez really was pulling out just because of a tweet — a bad one, it is true — then he was “disappointed.”

If. If the tweet did it, it was just the thing that tipped this over the edge.

There is more behind it, of course, and Perez didn’t go last year, either. There is the Negreira case (the reason then) and Madrid’s decision to ask to participate in the case as a victim. There is the fallout from that, with Laporta turning to that old conspiratorial favourite: Real Madrid as the team of the regime. There was Madrid’s response: a video that showed that Gen. Francisco Franco favoured Barcelona, the real regime team. One that the president of the Madrid government applauded, describing it as “magnificent,” and the Catalan govern demanded be taken down, describing it as offensive and a manipulation.

(It really didn’t, but we could be here all day on this.)

There also was Laporta’s recent line about “sociological Madridism,” the power they wield in media, government, business and beyond, being behind the pursuit of the Negreira case — and not the €7.2m Barcelona paid to the vice president of the referees’ committee over almost two decades.

(For what it’s worth, incidentally, many rushed to deny it and thus revealed it, sociological Madridism does exist. So does sociological Barcelonism. It’s right there in the paragraph above, with those political responses; it’s right there in the media every time you pick it up).

In short, things are not good between Madrid and Barcelona right now. But then this is, well, Madrid and Barcelona. Another thing that Gaspart said on Thursday night was that when he was president, he said things “much worse” than what Camps had said, and he is not alone.

Gaspart was the president whose first task was to sort out the mess from the departure of Luis Figo from Barcelona to Real Madrid. He did not sort out the mess. He made it worse. He was there the day that a pig’s head was thrown at Figo. He said it was all Figo’s fault. He had come to “provoke” them, he said. It wasn’t just a pig’s head that day, although it became the image of this rivalry. There were bottles, coins, lighters and even mobile phones; it wasn’t just that year either. The season before there had been a bike chain and a cockerel’s head, and when they met in the cup in 1968, bottles were thrown and two years on it was 30,000 cushions.

Santiago Bernabeu famously claimed: “It’s not true that I hate Catalonia; I love and admire Catalonia … in spite of the Catalans.” That provoked a response from the Barcelona president at the time, Narciso de Carreras, who declared: separators are worse than separatists. Bernabeu had come to the presidency in the first place following an infamous and politically charged cup meeting between the two clubs in 1943, the regime imposing a choreographed reconciliation and applying pressure on Madrid (and Barcelona) to change presidents.

The Madrid forward Juanito once took Barcelona president Josep Lluis Nunez to court, after he had said, publicly: “Juanito goes round leaving pregnant women on every corner.”

And then there was Ramon Mendoza, Madrid’s president between 1985 and 1995, who signed an agreement with Barcelona to work together on TV deals and merchandising and not to muscle-in on each other’s signings, but also denounced what he saw as Barcelona’s manipulation of a Catalan nationalist message and use of the regime team trope, and he took every opportunity to wind them up in search of what he called a “sporting narrative.” They were two superpowers, Mendoza said, and that meant they had to have the “nuclear bomb: you have to have missiles, you can’t combat permanent terror or blackmail with your hands behind your back.”

Perez’s first act as president was to sign Figo: not just because it was Figo but because it was Barcelona’s Figo. When Laporta put up a huge banner during presidential election campaigns, he didn’t do it on Avinguda Diagonal. He stuck it up within kicking distance of the Santiago Bernabeu. “Looking forward to seeing you again,” it said.

And for all the gravity of some of this, for all that there are things that do matter — the Negreira Case above all is genuinely significant — and some of it is grubby, tiresome, depressing, and truly pathetic, there is a serious undercurrent to it all. While those historical arguments often have you tearing your hair out, it can also feel like a game at times, hammed up, even manufactured. This is Real Madrid versus Barcelona, things are not supposed to be good between them. They’re not supposed to be nice to each other; the words that are silenced and censored are the ones when they praise someone on the other side.

Besides, as Mendoza’s discourse hints, they have things in common too, shared interests, a marriage of convenience. Don’t go to the Clásico, don’t allow for a photo sitting alongside Laporta, but beneath the surface, they are on the same side in many things, against the league, against the rest. They are the last remaining members of the Super League, clinging to each other, abandoned by the rest.

It’s a weird, uncomfortable place to be and one that is hard for many to understand, still less accept. This week, for many fans, the worst thing that happened in the ongoing battle between Madrid and Barcelona, the moment that most disgusted them, came at a meeting of LaLiga. There Madrid’s director general Jose Angel Sanchez and Barcelona’s president Laporta crossed paths. Face to face at last, after all the words, all the accusations, all the confrontations, these greatest of rivals, mortal enemies, smiled, laughed and gave each other a great big hug.