Real Madrid & Barcelona – Giants in a troubled league

A question: What defines a league as strong and what classes it as weak? Should a league’s overall strength be measured on the successes of it’s most powerful constituents? Or on the sum total of all parts?

If your answer is the former, then based on the 2009/2010 season’s outcome Spain’s La Liga is undoubtedly one of the strongest in world football. If you lean to the latter answer however, then La Liga may be classed as a league in serious structural trouble.

Last weekend, FC Barcelona retained the Spanish league title on the final day of the season, an exciting conclusion to one of the most engaging title races Spain has seen for years. Fierce rivals Real Madrid, after a summer of frivolous spending in which club president Florentino Perez admitted the club undertook two summers’ worth of buying just to catch up with an all-conquering Barça side, pushed them all the way.

But despite breathing down Barcelona’s necks for most of the season, this new look Real Madrid side could not leapfrog Pep Guardiola’s wonderful (and wonderfully consistent) side, making FC Barcelona Spanish champions for the twentieth time in their history.

A look at La Liga’s final table for 2009/2010 sums up the sheer bull-headed strength of Barcelona and Real Madrid this season but also, arguably, highlights the overall paucity of the league this campaign. At the top, Barça accrued 99 points over 38 games – the highest total in Spanish top flight history at a ratio of 2.6 points per game.

Behind them, Real Madrid finish second with 96 points – the highest league tally in their illustrious 108 year history. Yet, in the words of Anne Robinson, they leave with nothing.

Cast your eyes one place further down from this towering twosome and you see Valencia on 71 points. Spain’s third best team therefore finish 9 wins and a draw’s worth of results behind the overall champions and 25 points behind the runners-up. Valencia could have started the season with a 27 point head start and still not won the title.

Extend this to Sevilla in 4th place and the results are astonishing. Sevilla qualify for the Champions League yet finished 36 points behind the champions. In England that same points margin takes you from champions Chelsea to Birmingham City in 9th. In Germany, from Bayern Munich at the top all the way down to Freiburg. In 14th. Even Scotland, for all it’s problems and imbalances, was not so imbalanced.

Depending on your point of view then, Spain’s top division can either be portrayed as in rude health or possessing serious physical frailties.

Strong league

On the one hand, Spain’s Primera Liga is thriving. This time last year Barça won everything, Real Madrid drew the glare of the world’s spotlight onto Spanish football with their unbelievable spending spree and, along with England’s 50p tax rate, the balance of power in world football was thought by many to be swinging from England over to Spain.

Spain had the sunshine, the silverware, the sparkle, the storylines and of course, the world’s stars. Marquee players in England (Cristiano Ronaldo), France (Karim Benzema) and Italy (Kaka and Zlatan Ibrahimovic) all headed over to Iberian shores to do battle with or partner other world class footballers and superstars, like Xavi, Andres Iniesta and Lionel Messi.

“Objectively, Spanish football is the best in the world,” claimed the league’s president, José Luis Astiazarán at the time. Spanish football was on the rise and Barcelona v Real Madrid was the hottest ticket in town; the perfect embodiment of La Liga’s fresh and overwhelming allure.

Barça and Real Madrid are not Spain’s only examples of a thriving league this year though. Atletico Madrid finished in mid-table but won the Europa League, while Valencia’s own merits are evident in the abilities of individual talents like Juan Mata, David Silva and David Villa.

Away from the big two other top-class internationals have delighted week after week. Sergio Aguero and Diego Forlan at Atleti, Luis Fabiano – Brazil’s main striker and Jesus Navas at Sevilla, the trio mentioned above alongside emerging talents like Ever Banega at the Mestalla. Young players like Iker Muniain and David de Gea offer huge future promise.

Weak league

What has emerged from Barça’s extraordinary, almost wholly organic rise to prominence and Real’s newfound, financially engineered prowess however, is a corruption of the league’s balance.

On an almost weekly basis Real and Barça battered teams. Barcelona only lost once all season, to Atletico Madrid, dropping just 2 points at Camp Nou all season. Meanwhile Real Madrid smashed a record 102 league goals but won nothing.

Off the pitch, financial issues threaten to distort the Spanish game beyond all recognition. A financial report in 2008 showed that 88.6% of Spanish clubs were operating at a loss, while individually negotiated TV rights hand the big two clubs higher revenues and far greater bargaining power than any other team in Spain can dream of. And neither want to give that up.

Real Madrid’s TV deal with Mediapro, signed in 2006, is worth €1.1 billion Euros over seven years. Barcelona’s own deal earns them only narrowly less. Together they make more than half of the €520 million Euros a year the league generates from broadcasters, and each makes more than 15 times the TV revenue of seven other clubs in La Liga. The disparity is cavernous.

In April, 26 first and second division Spanish clubs signed a communique denouncing individual bargaining for TV rights for “completely unbalancing the league’s sporting potential.”

The future?

Plans to copy English football’s collective bargaining system for negotiating TV rights are hugely opposed by both Real Madrid and Barça, for obvious reasons. “FC Barcelona’s position is radically and absolutely against the collective sale of TV rights,” affirmed Joan Oliver, Barcelona’s general director. But without it the chasm separating Spanish football’s haves and have nots will only grow wider.

If, as expected, David Villa moves to Barcelona, Aguero moves on from Atletico and Luis Fabiano, Mata and Silva all move abroad or, worse, to Spain’s big two, how much further will competitive balance suffer? Spanish football, it appears, is approaching a crossroads.

On the positive side, such concerns are at least recognised by Spain’s football authorities. Financial strife in the lower divisions nearly led to a player strike earlier this year, while the TV rights issue grumbles on.

All this has prompted the Liga de Fútbol Profesional (LFP) to formulate plans for a new, Premier League-style breakaway top division, it’s considered aim being to create “a much more attractive and better-run competition than the current one,” according to their statement.

Whether the LFP can persuade it’s star turns to agree to collectively negotiated TV rights deals remains to be seen. Given Oliver’s words and the revenue both Real and Barça would lose – money they will argue is needed to compete with Europe’s best – it seems unlikely.

Until then these are troubled times for the newest self-styled best league in the world.

(photo via PerfectSmile_LeoCuccini on Flickr)

FC Barcelona, Football and Finance, Real Madrid, Spain, Spanish Primera Division