El Clásico: 5 classic Barcelona vs. Real Madrid clashes with Johan Cruyff

This may be a shock to younger readers, but Barcelona hasn’t always been a continent-dwarfing trophy-hoover of a football club. Indeed, in the immediate years BC — that’s Before Cruyff, a period of prehistory that ended in what we know as 1973 — Barcelona was nothing particularly special at all. Their last league title had come in 1960 thanks to the great Sándor Kocsis and the original (and best) Luis Suárez; since then, Real Madrid had dominated La Liga.

Plenty else was happening: the Camp Nou had opened, the club’s counter-cultural identity had begun to flower, and as Spain labored under the dictatorship of General Franco, the rivalry with Madrid began to acquire a sharp and inevitably political edge. But they weren’t winning many trophies.

Even the 1973-74 season, the coming of Johan Cruyff, had a ponderous start. Bureaucratic tangles kept him out of the first team for the first seven games of the season, and when he was finally eligible, Barcelona were 14th in the table, four places from bottom, had scored seven goals and picked up just two wins. They’d also drawn the first clásico of the season, 0-0, at the Camp Nou. Still, when you sign one of the most instinctively stylish men in history, you can perhaps expect a fashionably late, but spectacular, entrance. Then came the club’s eighth game, at home against Granada; then came Cruyff. He scored twice, and Barcelona won, 4-0.

By the time the second clásico rolled around in February, Barcelona and Cruyff were sizzling. Unbeaten since Cruyff’s debut, they’d put five past Sporting Gijon, four past Malaga, five past Celta Vigo, and had only failed to score in one game, a nil-nil draw away at city rivals Espanyol. They were relentless: from 14th place in October they were now six points clear at the top of the table, and had a goal difference of plus-31. The next best was Atlético Madrid, down in fourth, with plus-13.

Real Madrid, by contrast, were languishing in seventh place, nine points off the top. And while this might seem a little peculiar today, when this is the most hyped game on the planet and both teams are always at or near the top, Sid Lowe records that for this second clásico of the season “the Bernabéu was only about a third full.” Worse:

Some of them had come to see the opposition. Emilio Butragueño, a Madrid socio and later the eponymous character of the most emblematic generation of players the club had had since the late 1950s, was just a young kid that night and admitted that Cruyff was his idol. ‘And I wasn’t the only turncoat in the stadium,’ he confessed.

Those turncoats weren’t disappointed. Cruyff was the catalyst, and the Dutchman scored the second and best of Barcelona’s five, twisting and jinking his way past three defenders on the edge of the box before driving the ball home. It was, in the end, more than just a thrashing. It was a catharsis, a performance and a statement that resonated far beyond a simple two points in the league. In the aftermath and in the years since, this game has been variously hailed as a victory over franquismo, a tonic for the spirit of the Catalan nation, and as the moment that Barcelona’s style of football coalesced into something definitive, something identifiably their own.

Certainly, it helped them on their way to the trophy. Ten days later they beat Real Sociedad, 4-1; a week after that they thrashed CD Castellon, 5-0; and they didn’t lose a game until the title was secured.

Transformative and iconic he may have been, but Cruyff’s arrival at Barcelona for the first time didn’t result in a sustained spell of success, and he only won one more trophy, the 1978 Spanish Cup. Cruyff puts this down in part to biased refereeing, and in part a change in coach: Barcelona replaced legendary Dutch coach Rinus Michels with German Hennes Weisweiler, who clashed with Cruyff and lasted just a single season. Meanwhile, Real Madrid bounced back from that humiliation to win the next two titles.

Cruyff’s last on-field clásico came in December of the 1977-78 season and also featured five goals, though unfortunately for him and the Catalans, three of them went to the men in white. Cruyff was outshone by an excellent Real Madrid team built around José Antonio Camacho, Vicente del Bosque — who didn’t have a mustache at this point — and newly reinforced by German midfielder Uli Stielike and the brilliant, ever-so-slightly fiery Juanito, who you may recall went on to tread on Lothar Matthäus’ face.

Later in the season, Madrid won the reverse fixture in emphatic fashion, and went on to win the first of three consecutive titles; Barcelona picked up the cup, finished six points back in second, and both Michels and Cruyff left the club, the latter into an early retirement …

… which barely lasted a year. A series of failed business ventures forced Cruyff back into his boots, and he played for another 10 years across the USA, the Spanish second division and eventually back in his native Netherlands. He then took over as coach of Ajax in 1985, picking up the Dutch Cup in 1986 and 1987, along with the 1987 UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup.

Back in Barcelona, meanwhile, success had been relatively scarce. Since Cruyff’s departure, they’d picked up two Copas del Rey, two Cup Winners’ Cups, and a solitary title in 1984-85. And they couldn’t even really enjoy that properly, since the following year they’d reached the European Cup final as strong favorites, only to be frustrated by Steaua București, who came for penalties, got them, and won them, breaking the Catalans’ souls in the process. César Luis Menotti and Terry Venables had come and gone in the dugout, and Diego Maradona, Gary Lineker, and Steve Archibald had passed through the dressing room.

By 1988, Barcelona’s debts were rising while attendances and results were declining. Meanwhile, over in Madrid, a homegrown team built around noted Cruyff fan Emilio Butragueño was picking up title after title in rapacious, thrilling style, and former Barcelona player Bernd Schuster had defected over to the meringue side. Clearly, something had to be done.

Cruyff himself has said that it took him four years to get his Barcelona team right, culminating in the European Cup win of 1992, but they found success fairly quickly, even as he attempted to alter the style and improve the squad. In his first season in charge, 1988-89, they beat Sampdoria to lift another Cup Winners’ Cup again, and then in his second they reached the final again, losing to Manchester United, and also won the Copa del Rey. Naturally, Real Madrid won the league both seasons, their fourth and fifth titles in a row.

That meant that the following season would have at least four clásicos: two in the league, and the two legs of the Spanish Super Cup, a friendly between league and cup holders. The friendlies arrived first, and Madrid won them both. In the first leg at the Camp Nou, Barcelona’s new forward Hristo Stoichkov, who had been brought in to add some aggression, fight, and “mala leche” -- literally “bad milk” -- to a fairly meek squad, lived up to his billing in spectacular fashion by picking up a red card for stamping on the referee’s foot. Then, back at the Bernabéu, Madrid thumped four past the Catalans.

That was in December. Come January, and the third installment, things were delicately poised. On the one hand, Barcelona was at the top of the table, four points ahead of Atlético Madrid in second and eight clear of the defending champions, who sat in a lowly sixth. But on the other, it hadn’t been long since that humbling, and Barcelona had just been surprisingly beaten 1-0 away at Real Oveido. (Madrid, for their part, had also just lost the derby). Stoichkov was suspended and Ronald Koeman, a calm and classy presence in front of the Barcelona defense, was injured.

Still, they were at the Camp Nou, and where there’s Michael Laudrup, there’s hope. The languid Dane scored Barcelona’s first goal with a flying volley at full speed, a goal that was greeted with flares and explosions in the stands. Madrid equalized after some uncharacteristically sloppy play in midfield, but clearly fate was on Barcelona’s side. The second half opened with a 15 minute siege of the Madrid goal, and the winning goal came just after the hour, when Madrid’s Predrag Spasić instinctively nodded his head at the ball, sending it into his own net. What he was doing, what he was trying to do, only he knows.

From there, Barcelona won six of their next seven, and their canter to the title didn’t even slow when Cruyff was hospitalized following a heart attack and a bypass operation. They sealed it with four games left in slightly farcical fashion, losing, 4-0, to Cádiz on Saturday 11 May, only for Atlético Madrid to lose on Sunday. But the true shame here belongs to Real Madrid. Had they made a race of it, then the last game of the season — the second clásico, in the Bernabéu — could have been one of the great occasions. Winner takes all, a cup final for the league. Instead, Barcelona lost, 1-0, and it didn’t even matter.

Come 1993-94, Cruyff had successfully ditched the cigarettes in favor of lollipops, and Barcelona had won three straight titles as well as finally picking up that elusive first European Cup. All that was left for Cruyff the Manager to do was to emulate Cruyff the Player and stick five past Real Madrid. And luckily for all concerned — on the red-and-blue side of the argument, anyway — Romário had joined the Dream Team.

He scored three. The first is the funniest, the most remarkable and, frankly, the most unfair of the lot: the poor defender had every right to expect the little Brazilian to do what his body was promising, what his foot was declaring. To move across, and attack at an angle. So he starts to shift his weight and, just as he does, Romario’s lying, deceitful foot creeps obscenely round the ball, dinks it the other side, and then, as the defender’s body attempts to move in two directions at once, the ball and the striker skip off into empty space. The finish is insultingly precise, but after the turn it looks almost a formality. Had that goal been scored today, Twitter would have been unbearable for hours.

Madrid kept it at 1-0 for the rest of the first half, but Koeman slapped home a free-kick two minutes after the break, and then it all got a bit silly. Romario got his second after Madrid’s offside trap wasn’t so much sprung as revealed, to everybody’s surprise, to be made out of breadsticks; completed his hat trick in typically impertinent fashion, thumping home a no-look Laudrup cross from six yards out; and then turned provider for Ivan Iglesias to complete the rout.

Madrid didn’t have to wait too long for revenge, however. Almost exactly a year later, with Laudrup playing on the other side of the argument, Madrid picked up a 5-0 of their own. Ivan Zamorano got the hat-trick this time, though the real star of the show was Stoichkov, who got himself sent off after eight minutes. There’s bad milk, and then there’s that weird stuff with lumps in it that ruins your tea.

If you’re only going to play for Barcelona for one season, and you’re only going to score nine goals in that season, you might as well stick two of them past Real Madrid. That, we can safely assume, was the thinking of Bosnian striker Meho Kodro, who scored the first and last goals in Cruyff’s final clásico, and stands as a vaguely underwhelming emblem of Cruyff’s last season in charge.

Having won four titles on the bounce, Barcelona finished a disappointing fourth in 1994-95, behind Real Betis, Deportivo la Coruña, and inevitable champions Real Madrid. Drastic squad surgery was called for: Laudrup and goalkeeper Andoni Zubizarreta had gone the previous season, and Koeman, Stoichkov, and Romario were let go as well. But the business of replacing them and regenerating the squad would prove far from straightforward.

After eight years in charge, Cruyff’s always-tense relationship with the power brokers at Barcelona, particularly club president Josep Núñez, had soured beyond repair. The presence of Cruyff’s son, Jordi, in the first-team squad led to accusations of nepotism; Cruyff, for his part, felt he wasn’t supported in acquiring the players he wanted -- Jimmy Burns recounts that he presented a list that included Ryan Giggs and Steve McManaman, only to be accused of “wanting to waste money.” Cruyff also suspected that Núñez was using the Catalan press to intrigue against him.

The replacements that did arrive were a mixed bunch, and had to be heavily supplemented by players from the youth system. Robert Prosinecki came in from Sevilla, though he’d only last a season. Luis Figo arrived from Sporting. And then there was Kodro, a technically gifted, imposing forward, decent with both head and feet, who had scored 73 goals in four seasons for Real Sociedad. Whether he was Cruyff’s man or an imposition isn’t entirely clear, though looking at the goals he scored against Madrid, there’s definitely a player in there somewhere. The first is a neat, near-post finish, a proper poacher’s goal, while the second shows quick feet to readjust and an admirable clarity of thought.

But against the background of an unhappy club, he only managed seven other goals, and though Barcelona side reached the semi-finals of the UEFA Cup, the final of the Copa del Rey, and were just about in the title race until the end of April, they ended the season empty-handed. And with an empty dugout, too: amid rumors that Bobby Robson was due to take over, Cruyff had been sacked in the dressing room with two games to go. As for Kodro, he too was moved on at the end of the season. Barcelona had found another prolific striker to take his place, called Ronaldo. He was pretty good, it turned out.