David Beckham played for Real Madrid because, well, of course David Beckham played for Real Madrid.
Madrid signed soccer's first -- and perhaps only -- pop superstar from Manchester United in 2003 for €35 million. Like so many of the Galacticos-era moves from president Florentino Perez's first stint as club president, the transaction only seemed vaguely connected with "wanting to win soccer games." Beckham was insanely famous, so Perez had to have him.
It all seemed inevitable in hindsight, but it really wasn't.
In 2003, current Barcelona president Joan Laporta was elected to his first term after running on a platform of "I will sign David Beckham." He got elected by the supporters, but failed to follow through. Ferran Soriano, Laporta's then-VP and now the CEO at City Football Group, later admitted that the club also missed out on signing an 18-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo from Sporting Lisbon that same year: "We thought €18 million was too high a price."
Can you imagine if Barcelona had signed both Beckham and Ronaldo in the summer of 2003?
From that point on, the clubs seemed to fork off in opposite directions. As Madrid gobbled up every superstar in sight, Barcelona built from within and cultivated an extreme identity around always having the ball. It's hard to envision such a strong divergence with Ronaldo and Beckham wearing the blaugrana, but it's not hard to envision what the past 20 years might've looked like in that alternate reality.
It would have looked like what we're going to see on Sunday (10:15 a.m. ET, ESPN+) -- two wealthy clubs that are starting to look a lot like each other.
The Barca-fication of Real Madrid
In 2003, Beckham was the most famous active athlete in the world and more than anything, Perez wanted famous athletes wearing Real Madrid jerseys. He'd gotten elected in 2000 by promising to buy Luis Figo from Barcelona -- and then he did it. Zinedine Zidane arrived the following summer, then the original Ronaldo, then Beckham, then Michael Owen, and then Robinho. This wasn't a team; it was something else.
"We're content providers, like a film studio - and having a team with Zidane in it is like having a movie with Tom Cruise," said former head of marketing and current club CEO Jose Angel Sanchez. Except for a brief blip in between Perez's two stints at president, this studio mentality persisted from about 2000 to 2018. The second era of Galacticos included the likes of Kaka, Karim Benzema, Xabi Alonso, Mesut Ozil, Gareth Bale, Luka Modric, and of course, Cristiano Ronaldo. Perez even referred to a manager, Jose Mourinho, as a "galactico" when they hired him in 2010.
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If I had to use one word to describe the Galactico era, it would be "inconsistent." That's not a negative nor a positive; it's just what happened. These teams never totally made sense. They were stacking stars who didn't fit together -- I mean, they bought Ronaldo and Kaka in the same summer -- so the results rarely persisted at a necessary level across a 38-game season.
During Perez's first stint as president from 2000 to 2006, Madrid won the league twice and the Champions League once, something of a bare-minimum of success for a club that spent as much money as they did. During the second Galacticos era, from 2009 through 2018, they only won the league twice. In fact, they finished third as often as they finished first. In a sport where payroll spend correlates so tightly with success, this was a minor failure, at best.
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Of course, no one cares! Why? Because they won the Champions League four freaking times. Under both Carlo Ancelotti and Zidane, we saw Madrid's talent string together just enough performances at just the right moments to conquer the European Cup... again and again and again and again.
Then they sold Ronaldo to Juventus, and they started to look a little more like Barcelona.
Since 2018, Madrid has spent $100 million on a player just once, and it went so poorly that it seemed to confirm this was a new era -- one that didn't have room for ill-fitting, under-performing superstars. Since joining from Chelsea for $126.5m in 2019, Eden Hazard has played just 22% of the possible LaLiga minutes. In the past, someone above the manager might've forced him into more playing time at the expense of the team's cohesion.
Instead, in the four full seasons since Ronaldo left, Madrid already won as many LaLiga titles as they did across the entirety of his decade with the club. And they're doing it with a new type of team, built in a new kind of way.
Of the 10 most expensive transfers in club history, just three of them are currently even on the team and only one of them, Aurelien Tchouameini, is a unanimous first-choice starter. Put another way: Despite massive transfer-fee inflation over the past 19 years, Beckham cost Madrid more than 13 of the 18 players who have appeared in at least 100 minutes for the club so far this season.
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Now, it's not that they're not spending money or not willing to spend money -- see: Mbappe, Kylian -- but there's clearly an idea behind the players they're bringing in. They're all either rangy, explosive and young, or they're established and free. OK, not "free," per se -- David Alaba and Antonio Rudiger are among the highest-paid defenders in the world, but Madrid added both of them without having to pay transfer fees.
They spent $88m on Tchouameini, which shatters the record fee for a defensive midfielder, but he's 22 years old and the whole point of being Real Madrid, one of the two or three biggest revenue-generators in the world year after year, is you can pay a lot of money to lock up the next great defensive midfielder for the next decade. The same goes for Eduardo Camavinga, who cost $34.1m to bring over from Rennes as an 18-year-old last summer.
Vinicius Jr. and Rodrygo fit this mold, too. They each cost $49.5m and both were signed as 18-year-olds. That's a lot of money for two teenagers, especially with so much potential volatility in the years ahead, but the risk inherent with a fee like that, once again, doesn't matter much when you're Madrid. And the upside? We're seeing it now. Vinicius is undoubtedly the best two-way winger in the world already, and Rodrygo seems like he's made his own leap. Coming into the season, an injury to Benzema seemed to be the one thing that could sink this team, but Benzema got hurt and they didn't miss a beat because Rodrygo's been scoring or assisting a goal every 90 minutes in his absence.
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Then there's Federico Valverde, who cost $5.5m to sign from Penarol in Uruguay as an 18-year-old. He assisted on the winning goal in the Champions League final, has played more minutes than anyone on the team other than Vini and Alaba, and is now, unironically, being compared to Steven Gerrard by his manager.
It just all feels good. Sure, that's vibes-based analysis, but this club has spent the better part of two decades mocking the idea of data- and/or tactical-based evaluation. It's Oct. 14, and they haven't lost a game across all competitions.
The mix of superstar veterans and hot-shot kids is about as good as it gets; the older guys fill in all the gaps with their savvy positioning and tricky passing, while the youngsters more than make up for the ground that Modric, Kroos, and Benzema can no longer cover. They all lifted Vini up after he was racially abused before the Atletico match, and for perhaps the first time this century, Real Madrid team that just emanates a joy not only recognized by the people who grew up supporting the club.
The Madrid-ification of Barcelona
For the better part of the 21st Century, Barcelona seemed to almost exist in direct contrast -- if not refutation -- of Madrid.
While the latter's identity was "we have no identity beyond our famous players," the Catalans developed a number of homegrown superstars and multiple era-defining teams that were built around an obsession over the ball. They needed to have it, and you couldn't get it. The approach only worked because of their homegrown core and because the club (unlike Madrid) specifically recruited players who could execute the Barca way.
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At the peak of the rivalry between the two clubs, it was impossible not to feel like it was a battle between creation and destruction. Led by Messi, Guardiola's Barca teams produced never-before-seen, and not-since-replicated, possession-based dominance. Under Mourinho, Madrid were simply trying to burn it all down.
There's no right or wrong philosophy of football, but most neutral observers were happy to see Barcelona's methods win out more often than not. After all, the game's shift toward more ambitious possession structures and risky attacking play was way more appealing than the alternative that Madrid were offering.
But somewhere within all of this, Madrid may have helped fuel Barcelona's eventual decline.
In his book "The Barcelona Complex," Simon Kuper mentions that Messi only seriously considered leaving the club once before he actually left last summer: in 2013-14, when he was first having issues with the Spanish government over unpaid taxes. "In June 2013, Inigo Suarez, the lawyer tasked with Messi's affairs, emailed Jorge Messi to say he had met with representatives of Real Madrid who were willing to buy the player for €250m," Kuper writes. "Madrid even offered to enlist Spain's then prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, to make the problem go away."
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With Madrid circling, Barca really only had one choice: to give Messi a massive raise. They continued to pump up his salary over the following years, as they should have; he's the greatest to ever do it. But with Messi locked in, two things happened: The club started to tether the salaries of their other key players, who were nowhere near as productive as Messi, to Messi's ever-rising salary, and as Kuper writes, "his presence allowed the organization to get lazy. With him on the field, Barca didn't need to think as hard."
The result was a Catalan version of the Galacticos -- just without the Champions League success. Barcelona's wage bill inflated with each passing year, and they continued to whiff on uber-expensive players. Their signings were so bad, in fact, that I was able to write an entire piece where I argued, with a straight face, that they might have been better off not signing anyone for seven straight seasons from 2015 through this past summer.
Instead, per the site Transfermarkt, Barcelona spent $1.45 billion on transfer fees over that stretch -- more than anyone other than Chelsea, Juventus and Manchester City. Over that same period, Madrid only -- I stress "only" in quotes here -- spent $874m on transfer fees, 13th-most of any club. But even that undersells just how differently the two clubs were being run.
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Barcelona's net transfer spend (fees received minus fees paid) dating back to the summer of 2015 was minus-$502 million, less than five English clubs buoyed by the league's expanding broadcast deal (both Manchester clubs, Chelsea, Arsenal and West Ham), Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain, and AC Milan. Madrid, meanwhile, rank in 69th with a minus-$50.7 net spend, which places them right between Getafe and Chivas de Guadalajara.
Net-spend isn't a be-all-end-all metric -- and Madrid pay higher salaries than any team in the Premier League -- but Barcelona have become what Madrid used to be: a team that throws transfer fees at all of its problems. That was never more apparent than in the lever-filled summer of 2022 when Laporta, back in charge as president for a second term, went from calling the debt-ridden club "clinically dead" to spending $168.3m on transfer fees in a matter of months.
Rather than accept a youth-led rebuild of the club from within, which would entail shedding burdensome salaries and playing more academy prospects as the team gradually got its finances in order, Laporta & Co. instead sold off large chunks of the club's future revenue to sign, among others, 33-year-old striker Robert Lewandowski for $49.5m. If that's not a Galactico move, then I don't know what is. And we're already seeing the downsides of the approach come into view, as the club is now on the verge of Champions League elimination and losing all the revenue that comes along with participation in the knockout rounds.
Despite all of that, though, the team does seem like it's at least back among the best -- for now. FiveThirtyEight's model rates them as the sixth-best team in the world and they're averaging 2.75 points per game so far in domestic play, tied for the best across the Big Five leagues with, yes, Real Madrid.
This is the biggest game of the season, and the most important Clasico since some time before 2018. And on Sunday, Barcelona will have Xavi on the sideline, plus Sergio Busquets in the midfield, flanked by a pair of technical teenagers in Gavi and Pedri. As for Madrid, Benzema, Kroos, and Modric will all be there, too.
Yet while some of the details remain the same, just about everything else, fundamentally, has changed.