Soccer

La Liga season preview: How Barcelona and Real Madrid might screw it up, plus how to watch

Yes, it should be a two-team league, but those two teams are finding ways to mess up and make La Liga more interesting.

by Kim McCauley

Aug 21, 2015, 6:24 PM UTC

Alex Caparros/Getty Images

For years, La Liga was derisively referred to as a glorified Scottish Premier League, where two teams ruled the rest and everyone else was irrelevant. Then Rangers got relegated to the fourth division of Scottish soccer and Atlético Madrid won the Spanish title, so joke’s on you, haters!

Besides, even if La Liga doesn’t have the balance that has been forced on the Premier League by television money and the Bundesliga by ownership rules, it’s still reasonably competitive. The bottom of the barrel teams certainly aren’t any worse than those in Serie A and Ligue 1. And because La Liga is a place where just about everyone tries to play decent soccer and the referees don’t allow anything too nasty, big clubs like to send promising young players on loan to Spain’s slew of broke teams.

We’re not going to lie to you: Real Madrid and Barcelona are the two best teams in this league, and they benefit from an awful television rights setup that’s crippling Spanish soccer. But they’ve also got more money than sense, and Spain’s second tier has gotten very good at maximizing its resources. Maybe there are only two teams with global superstars, but there are about eight that are good enough to hang with anyone in the world, and that makes for a league with at least two good games a week. It is, at least selectively, very much worth your time.

How to watch

If you live in the United States or Canada, you can find the games on beIN Sports. While it’s not in as many households as NBCSN or Fox Sports 1, it’s currently on the sports tier of most TV packages, and is pretty affordable on services like Fubo and Sling. And unlike Serie A fans, you won’t be frustrated by the network choosing to show something else -- at least Madrid and Barca’s matches are always on live. All games are streaming on beIN Sports Connect.

In the U.K., you can find La Liga on Sky Sports.

Barcelona: Weathering the storm

Barcelona was banned from registering new players this summer because they violated FIFA rules by signing under-18, non-EU players, but still went out and bought some new guys anyway. Arda Turan and Aleix Vidal will become important players for the Blaugrana in January, but can’t play for the team until then, meaning Barca’s squad is pretty thin. It doesn’t help that Gerard Pique is suspended for at least four games for calling a referee’s mother names and insisting that he was going to defecate on her.

Arda and Vidal are the replacements for Pedro and Martin Montoya, who have been sold and loaned, respectively. Right now, Barca is relying on the corpse of Dani Alves to man the right flank, and he did so very poorly in the club's Spanish Super Cup and UEFA Super Cup games. Neymar's out with the mumps, so Rafinha Alcantara (who isn't a winger) or promising but raw 19-year-old starlet Munir will be starting for a bit.

And then there's the center of midfield. Xavi has departed, while Andres Iniesta is playing older than 31. Barca is almost certainly going to take part in the race to sign Paul Pogba, and should be able to add a star like PSG's Marco Verratti or Dortmund's Ilkay Gündogan in the event that they fail to land the big fish. But that won't happen until at least January, and most likely not until next summer. La Masia products Sergi Roberto and Sergi Samper were tiny bit-part players last season, and they'll need to become legitimate first-team players this season for Barcelona to get to the winter break within a couple games of the top of the table.

But despite those problems, it’s likely that Barca will transform and start looking like world beaters once they’re allowed to register new players. Their competitors will need to build a sizable lead before then if they want to keep the Blaugrana from lifting another league title, because they will have the best team in the league in January, barring any catastrophic injuries.

Real Madrid: Really talented, but really funny and probably a trainwreck

If you didn't really care if they won or lost, Real Madrid was awesome last year. They scored a lot of goals and they got scored on more than a team of their quality should have. Sometimes they refused to pass Gareth Bale the ball for entire matches. They never played with a defensive midfielder and, as a result, their midfield was easily bypassed in games where Luka Modric was anything less than god-like.

This is not a surprise. “He rarely passed the ball more than three meters,” Real Madrid president Florentino Perez famously said after selling the legendary Claude Makelele, who has a position on the pitch named after him. “Younger players will arrive who will cause Makelele to be forgotten.” After selling Makelele, who won a European Cup with Los Merengues, they did not reach the Champions League final again for 11 years.

Perez stayed on-brand this summer by purchasing Mateo Kovacic instead of someone who plays defense. While Kovacic is undoubtedly one of the best young players in the world and a good signing for anyone, he is also extremely redundant in a team that has Isco, Modric and Toni Kroos. Perez doesn’t care, because anyone who doesn’t regularly pass the ball more than three meters is useless.

But incredibly, Perez hired Rafa Benitez, who has never agreed with that philosophy at all. If there's a manager who adores midfielders who don't have a creative idea in their head and abhors a brand of soccer that's even remotely interesting, it's Rafa. He's already been yelled at by Cristiano Ronaldo in training multiple times and will inexplicably exile one of Isco, James or Kroos in due course.

The reason Perez hired Rafa, despite all of this, is that he’s a yes man. Perez paid a world record fee for Gareth Bale and cannot stand that Bale is not as good as Neymar. He needs Bale to be better than Neymar, for his ego, so he hired a manager who will do as he’s told and build a team around Bale. Everything about this will be a massive failure, and none of it will be Bale’s fault.

But if you’re not a Madridista, it’s certainly going to be entertaining.

Atlético Madrid: Ready for another title challenge

The genius of Atléti is that they always have an army of young players out on loan that you forgot they developed or purchased years ago. They sell a big star, you think “uh oh, how are Atléti going to replace him,” and then their built-in replacement has a fantastic season.

Arda, Mario Mandzukic, Raul Jimenez, Miranda and Mario Suarez are gone. Not only are Yannick Ferreira Carrasco, Jackson Martinez, Luciano Vietto and Stefan Savic in to replace them, but so are returning loanees Olivier Torres, Emiliano Velázquez and Thomas Partey, along with Argentine star Angel Correa, who is finally recovered from a heart condition and ready to play. Guilherme Siqueira looks likely to leave, but Felipe Luis has returned from Chelsea to replace him. Even if Antoine Griezmann is sold at the deadline, Atléti will like what they have in reserve. This is a deep team, with two very good players at every position.

There’s also every reason to expect their returning young players will get better. Jose Gimenez, Saul Alvarez and Koke look like players still in the ascendency, not ones on the verge of plateauing, and they were all very good last year anyways. As long as they don’t fall off a cliff, they’re still going to be excellent contributors on a team fighting for trophies.

Between all of that, Madrid’s transfer policy, Barca’s transfer ban and manager Diego Simeone signing a contract extension, there’s every reason to believe that Atléti can contend with the big two this season.

One thing to love about the rest of the “big” teams

Real Sociedad: David Moyes' press conferences.

Valencia: Los Che captain and Real Madrid castoff Dani Parejo has developed into one of the most complete midfielders in Spain. Once pretty much a pure No. 10, he's added goals and some defensive workrate to his game. He's a signature player on this otherwise good, but nondescript team.

Sevilla: Speed down the flanks. Unai Emery has Los Rojiblancos executing his fast, wide counter-attacking style to perfection, and new signing Yevhen Konoplyanka is going to make them even more dangerous in that regard. If you like the Bundesliga in general, you'll probably like Sevilla.

Villarreal: The pretty passing combinations. Villarreal isn't always the most organized team and aren't great at adjusting their tactics to get a result, but they're committed to playing the game in a style that they think is "the right way," which is certainly commendable. They're certainly not boring.

Athletic Bilbao: Physicality. After Marcelo Bielsa took away what made them distinctive in Spanish soccer, Ernesto Valverde has done a good job of bringing it back. They play direct, they punch people in the mouth and Aritz Aduriz scores headers.

5 players to watch not on Madrid or Barca

Because you know the stars on the top two already.

Luciano Vietto, Atlético Madrid: If he can ever improve his finishing, he’ll be genuinely world class. The 21-year-old striker scored 12 goals at Villarreal last season, but his movement off the ball and spectacular first touch put him in a position to score way more than that. He also picks up a decent number of assists too. Under a world-class coach, and with world-class teammates, he could become the next Sergio Aguero.

Nolito, Celta Vigo: Since leaving Barca B, he's been sensational for Benfica and Celta. He was the only player outside of the big two that racked up double-digit assists and goals last season. If he does it again this year, he could get a second crack at playing for a huge club.

Aymeric Laporte, Athletic Bilbao: He’s widely regarded as one of the world’s top young central defenders, and Athletic has managed to hang onto him longer than most mid-table teams keep their emerging superstars. That’s what loyalty to home-grown talent will do for you, we guess. He performed very well against Barcelona in the Spanish Super Cup, and gets to play them again this weekend.

Sergio Canales, Real Sociedad: While Moyes has managed to Moyesify La Real and make them pretty dull by La Liga's standards, they still have one of the sport's silkiest playmakers. He'll pick up a bunch of injuries and miss half the season, but when he's on the pitch, he makes the game look effortless.

Jose Luis Gaya, Valencia: Despite interest from Real Madrid, Spain’s most promising young fullback opted to sign a contract extension with Valencia. He’ll make quite a bit less money than he would have at the Bernabeu, but staying with Los Che guarantees that he’ll be one of his team’s star players. He’s as good of a two-way fullback as you’re going to see in La Liga.