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          What will Barcelona vs. Real Madrid look like five years from now? El Clasico could be totally different

          • Ryan O'HanlonMar 17, 2023, 01:05 PM ET
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              Ryan O'Hanlon is a staff writer for ESPN.com. He's also the author of "Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game's Analytics Revolution."
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          Five years ago, on the right or wrong day, it seemed like the six best teams in the world might stay that way forever.

          In Pep Guardiola's second season, Manchester City were in the midst of a run toward 100 points, a Premier League record. Juventus weren't far behind, winning 95 points and their seventh straight Serie A trophy. Bayern Munich took down the Bundesliga by a 21-point margin.

          Paris Saint-Germain had wrested control of Ligue 11 back from AS Monaco by signing Kylian Mbappe and Neymar before they began their campaign; it was only a matter of time until that turned into global domination. And Barcelona did what they almost always did while Lionel Messi wore the Blaugrana: they won LaLiga, for the seventh time in 10 years. Throw in Real Madrid, who also did what they almost always do: lose LaLiga, but win the Champions League, finishing third in their own country while simultaneously lifting the European title for the third year in a row and the fourth in the past five.

          In the midst of that kind of across-the-continent dominance, it was really hard to imagine any kind of different future, and while some things have remained the same -- Bayern have an 85% chance, per FiveThirtyEight, of winning their 11th straight Bundesliga title -- the landscape looks quite different today. The Premier League is the dominant league in the world; two English teams other than Manchester City have won Champions League titles over this five-year stretch. Juventus haven't won Serie A since the first year of the pandemic; they're currently in seventh. PSG lost another league title, this time to Lille, and have routinely embarrassed themselves in Europe.

          As for the two teams facing off in El Clasico this weekend?

          Madrid lost Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale, the two biggest stars from their famous front three ... and the 30-something third-wheel, Karim Benzema, became a Ballon d'Or winner, driving Real to two league titles in three years and another Champions League trophy. Barcelona, meanwhile, lost Messi, and they haven't won LaLiga since before the pandemic. In each of the past two seasons, they've been eliminated ... from the Europa League.

          On top of all that, Barcelona are tied up in a mix of financial and legal issues, while Madrid are still the leading voice, championing the formation of the widely despised and for-now-disgraced European Super League.

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          In soccer years, five years is a long time. The next five years, for these two clubs in particular, could feel like forever. What might the most popular rivalry in world soccer look like in 2028?

          Where were they five years ago?

          In the 2017-18 season, Madrid featured 15 players who played approximately 50% of the available league minutes. That number got stretched a bit because of how their season played out. They finished third in LaLiga, 17 points behind Barcelona; concurrently, they made another improbable, frequently absurd run to a Champions League trophy. So as the season dragged on, Zinedine Zidane heavily rotated his squad in domestic play in order to prioritize the competition they actually had a chance to win.

          Those 15 players, along with their ages at the beginning of the season and the percentage of minutes they played:

          Weighted by minutes played, Madrid's average age in La Liga in 2017-18 was 27.1 -- slightly above average, but a very clear profile of a team that's set up to win right now. Not past its prime, right in it.

          Despite winning the league rather easily, Barcelona manager Ernesto Valverde selected a much more top-heavy squad in his first season with the club; six players played more minutes than anyone on Madrid. Only 11 players met that 49% threshold for Barca, but 14 guys featured in at least 1,000 league minutes.

          The 1k club:

          Barcelona were a little older than Madrid -- a 27.7 average age, weighted by minutes played -- but still firmly in that win-now window.

          What does that mean for the future?

          The turnover at each club in the previous five-year cycle should provide us with some insight into what to expect in the next five-year cycle.

          At Madrid, here's the list of players who have appeared in at least 25% of the league minutes this season, along with their current ages:

          No player who's played two thirds of the league minutes for Madrid this season was on the team five years ago. And among the players who played 50% of the minutes five years ago, four of them are playing 50% of the minutes this season. Asensio, Nacho and Ceballos are contributing squad players who were on the team, too.

          Although there are a number of young stars sprinkled throughout the roster, Madrid's average age is actually higher than it was five years ago, ticking up slightly to 28.0. Given that, let's say that somewhere around four of the current Madrid mainstays are still mainstays in 2028. It might seem like that number should be higher, but five years ago, Asensio, Varane and Isco all seemed good bets to still be key players for the club come today. For various reasons -- in order: player not developing, player wanting to leave, player falling off a cliff -- none of them are.

          Here's the same list for Barcelona:

          In terms of two-thirds-of-all-minutes players for Barcelona, there are two holdovers from five years ago: Ter Stegen and Busquets. That's two more than Madrid, but they're also the only two players who are even still playing 50% of the minutes. Throw in Dembele, who was on the team five years ago, and we'll say it's up to three. The only other holdover player who's still playing significant squad minutes is Jordi Alba.

          Unlike Madrid, Barca's average age has dropped down to 26.5 -- the third-lowest mark in LaLiga this season. They've had more turnover than Madrid over the past five seasons, but seem likely to have somewhat less of it over the next half decade.

          Although there are eight players who have played at least 40% of the league minutes and won't even be 30 come this time in 2028, it's highly unlikely that all of them stay healthy, continue to improve and decide they want to stay at Barcelona. My guess is that about five of them are still around in five years.

          Just like with Madrid, the same lesson applies: not every youngish player who's working out today will still be at the same level in 2028. A number of players who seemed like long-term foundational pieces five years ago -- Coutinho, Umtiti, Messi and even Sergi Roberto -- are either no longer with the team or are squad players.

          What about the coaches? Well, Madrid are on their third since 2018, while Barcelona are on their fourth. There's almost no chance Carlo Ancelotti is still with Madrid in five years, and although Xavi probably has one of the longer leashes of any coach Barcelona will ever hire, the safe bet is still that someone else is coaching the club in five years. That's the safe bet for, well, pretty much every other club on the planet, too.

          But what about everything else?

          Those general outlooks occur within a world in which Barcelona and Madrid remain roughly where they are right now. For the past year as reported, Madrid brought in more revenue than any other club that isn't currently being investigated by its own league for more than 100 potential financial violations, while Barca ranked seventh in revenue. And according to the estimated wage bills from the site FBref, Madrid rank third in player wages, while Barcelona rank second. (PSG are first.)

          So long as both clubs can still pay their players more money than everyone else, they'll both continue to look like they've looked throughout the past five years. Whether that happens, though, is a whole different story.

          The past five years across European soccer has been defined -- more than anything else -- by the growing financial power of the Premier League. Thanks to the league's massive broadcasting-revenue advantage, 16 of the 30 richest teams in the world play in the Premier League. For the first time since Deloitte started gathering the information in 1997, more than half (11) of the top 20 revenue-generating clubs come from one league.

          We might be hitting a sports-broadcasting-rights bubble at some point, but so far the Premier League has been immune to it. After the latest auctions, it was the only league to see increases on its previous broadcasting deals.

          In response, both Madrid and Barcelona have been at the forefront of the push to create the breakaway European Super League. Along with Juventus, they're the only clubs who didn't back out after the embarrassing failed formation of the competition in the spring of 2021. Both club presidents, Real's Florentino Perez and Barca's Joan Laporta, frequently talk about the threat of the Premier League's financial power. Of course, the financial power wielded by both Spanish clubs over the past 20 years was totally fine to them.

          Despite being the club of the Galacticos, Madrid haven't lost themselves in a fruitless chase to keep up. Outside of the disastrous move for Eden Hazard, they're rarely overpaid for past-their-peak players, and they've frequently been willing to let big-name stars walk without suffering much of a drop-off. They also managed the pandemic as well as anyone outside of England, playing their empty-arena home matches in a smaller stadium while they renovated the Santiago Bernabeu.

          Barcelona ... have done the exact opposite. You know about the levers by now; rather than taking their medicine and rebuilding around their in-house young talent, they sold off 25% of their future domestic broadcasting revenue and 49.9% of their retail operations for a short-term cash infusion to spend on transfers last summer.

          In a sense, that has already failed. While Barcelona are leading LaLiga, they lost out on tons of revenue after they were eliminated in the group stages of the Champions League for the second year in a row. Further revenue was lost from their elimination by Manchester United before the Europa League round of 16. On top of that, a Spanish court announced this week that it would be opening an investigation into corruption allegations against Barcelona for payments to the vice president of the Spanish referees association.

          The club paid the company of Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira some €7 million between 2001 and 2018. Prosecutors allege that Sandro Rosell and Josep Maria Bartomeu, previous Barcelona presidents, made an agreement where Negreira "would carry out actions aimed at favoring Barca in the decision-making of the referees in the matches played by the club and thus in the results of the competitions." Laporta, who was also president from 2003 to 2010 while the payments were being made, has denied the allegations. As my colleague Gabriele Marcotti wrote earlier this week, this just doesn't pass the smell test.

          Given all of that, this weekend's Clasico could be one of the last of its kind: a front-running Barcelona holding off a chasing Real Madrid for a much-desired LaLiga title. Barcelona have a nine-point lead, with an 85% chance of winning the league, per FiveThirtyEight. A win would bump that up to 96%, while a loss would drop it down to 69%. A tie would keep the percentages roughly where they currently are. In other words: it's a massive match.

          LaLiga Clasicos, of course, are supposed to always be massive matches, but the days of this match almost automatically featuring the two best teams in the world are already gone -- and they're never coming back, not as long as the Premier League has so much money to throw around.

          Furthermore, Barcelona continue to be run on the thinnest of margins -- competitively, financially and legally. Perhaps that'll never catch up with them and they truly will be too big to fail, but those future revenues they sold off are never coming back. Barcelona aren't too big to be the, I don't know, 15th-best team in the world, and one very real potential outcome in the next five years seems like it could be a widening gap in the overall competitiveness of these two clubs. That's, at least, where it seems like their financial futures are headed.

          The main way to change these various trajectories, of course, would be for the Super League to get resurrected and therefore guarantee both clubs massive revenues for way beyond the next five years. Ultimately, that's what both Real Madrid and Barcelona want. Regardless of whether they get it, Sunday's match at the Spotify Camp Nou will look a lot different than whatever it is that comes next.