A bad season for Real Madrid might be about to get much, much worse. A calamitous 2025-26 has already seen Madrid lose a coach in Xabi Alonso, crash out of the Copa del Rey, exit the UEFA Champions League in the quarterfinals and suffer a string of LaLiga losses which have left them trailing leaders Barcelona, and facing a trophyless season for the second year in a row.
In just the last week, Madrid have been hit by a series of behind-the-scenes scandals: an injured Kylian Mbappé took an ill-advised mid-season holiday, details emerged of a dressing room bust-up between Antonio Rüdiger and Álvaro Carreras, and vice-captain Federico Valverde was taken to hospital with concussion after a confrontation with Aurélien Tchouaméni.
Now, Barcelona have the chance to twist the knife in Sunday’s Clásico (LIVE at 3 p.m. ET across ESPN networks in the U.S.). They go into the game at Camp Nou 11 points clear of Madrid, with four games of the season left. That means Barça need just a draw to be confirmed as league champions, securing the title against their biggest rivals, in the most high-profile game in club football. The Catalans’ celebrations would be raucous, and Madrid’s suffering would be even more acute for having to experience it all, up close, with nowhere to hide.
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You might think that Clásicos are always decisive. After all, each LaLiga season inevitably concludes with giants Madrid and Barça battling it out for the title, with an interloper like Atlético Madrid occasionally making it a three-horse race. The points up for grabs in each season’s two league Clásicos inevitably go some way towards deciding where the trophy is headed.
“There’s a heightened sense of anticipation going into these games,” Paul Clement, Carlo Ancelotti’s assistant in his first spell at Madrid – and now working with Ancelotti coaching Brazil‘s national team — told ESPN in 2024. “You know you’re going to have an impact on where the title goes. They’re six-point games.”
Take last season, where Barcelona’s LaLiga title win — in coach Hansi Flick’s first campaign in charge — was made possible by winning both league Clásicos: a comprehensive 4-0 victory at the Bernabéu in October 2024, and a more competitive 4-3 win at Montjuïc in May 2025. Barça were the better team all season, but the Clásicos sealed the deal for Flick. They ended the season four points ahead of Real Madrid.
The season before also saw Carlo Ancelotti’s Madrid end up as champions thanks, in part, to a Clásico double. They beat Barça 2-1 at Montjuïc in October 2023 thanks to Jude Bellingham‘s brace, and then 3-2, with another dramatic Bellingham added-time winner, in April 2024. Madrid finished the campaign with a 10-point lead over Barça, but those Clásico results, especially the first, set the tone.
Other Clásicos have seen managers fired, and entire projects reassessed. Barcelona’s 5-1 win at Camp Nou in October 2018, with Luis Suárez scoring a hat trick, signalled a premature end for Julen Lopetegui as Real Madrid coach after just four months in the job. Another drastically one-sided scoreline, a 4-0 victory for Barça at the Bernabéu in November 2015, was the beginning of the end for Rafa Benítez, who never regained the trust of club president Florentino Pérez and was sacked two months later.
Go further back, to what many consider the peak of the rivalry — the Guardiola vs. Mourinho years — and there are plenty of examples of season-defining Clásicos. Barcelona’s 6-2 destruction of Manuel Pellegrini’s Madrid at the Bernabéu in May 2009, for some the greatest-ever Clásico performance by a team, left Barça in a commanding position, seven points clear at the top of the table with four games left.
Then, 18 months later, in November 2010, Guardiola’s 5-0 Camp Nou demolition of Mourinho’s challengers was unforgettable, although it only left Barça two points ahead of Madrid with 25 matches remaining, the title’s destination still an open question. When the two teams met four times in three competitions over 18 gruelling days in 2011, the 1-1 LaLiga draw left the gap at eight points, with six games left.
“Everyone remembers those games,” former Madrid defender Raúl Albiol — who watched the 5-0 from the bench, and was sent off in the 2011 encounter — told ESPN in 2023. “They were special.”
But in one, surprising respect, Sunday’s game might top them all. If Barcelona avoid defeat, this meeting would become the first Clásico in almost 100 years — dating back to 1932 — to definitively, mathematically determine the title’s destination. Back then, on the final day of the 1931-32 campaign, Madrid clinched the league by drawing 2-2 at Barcelona, and thus confirming Madrid’s finish ahead of second-placed Athletic Club. It was the first of Madrid’s 36 league titles to date.
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Will Barcelona win back-to-back LaLiga titles in El Clásico?
Luis Garcia and Craig Burley preview the upcoming El Clásico with Barcelona on the brink of winning another LaLiga title.
Anything but a loss for Barcelona on Sunday would, therefore, be history in the making. It would also confirm the extent of Madrid’s current crisis on and off the field. Back-to-back seasons without a major trophy just don’t tend to happen at the success factory that is the Bernabéu. In fact, it’s something that happens once every 20 years or so. Madrid’s last two consecutive seasons without major silverware came in 2004-05 and 2005-06. Before that, it was all the way back in 1982-83 and 1983-84.
In 2006, the consequences for Madrid were seismic: Pérez resigned as president, admitting that “a change of direction” was required after the failure of the star-studded Galáctico project, before returning three years later. This summer, with a new coach set to replace Álvaro Arbeloa and plans for a squad shake-up — as well as widespread calls for an overhaul of the club at executive level — could be similarly dramatic.
If there’s one, small consolation for Madrid, it’s that they still have a chance to delay Barça’s celebrations. This season’s two previous Clásicos, Madrid’s 2-1 LaLiga win in October and Barça’s 3-2 Spanish Supercopa victory in January, have shown that in a one-off head-to-head contest with their rivals, this Madrid side can compete.
Granted, the context now is different. Arbeloa is coach, not Alonso. The team have endured a mortifying week of dressing room revelations, culminating in a physical altercation between two senior players, Tchouaméni and Valverde. And we don’t yet know if Mbappé’s fitness will allow him to perform anything close to his best.
It doesn’t look good, but Madrid must cling to their hopes of pulling off an upset, to prevent Barça from writing another painful chapter in this epic rivalry.
