The Whole Thing Started Over a Stupid Pint
You know how these things go. I was sitting down last Thursday, just trying to enjoy a quiet beer after a long day of pretending to work, and my buddy Mark starts yapping about football. Specifically, about El Clásico. He was absolutely convinced, waving his hands around, that Real Madrid had totally dominated the rivalry for the last five or six years, and if you looked at the last 30 matches, the head-to-head record must be heavily skewed in their favor.
I knew he was talking absolute nonsense. My gut told me Barcelona had a surprisingly strong recent run, but proving it in real-time, over the noise of the pub, wasn’t happening. I tried to pull up some quick stats on my phone, but the results were scattered, confusing, and unreliable. One site was counting pre-season friendlies, another was missing Copa del Rey games.
I got annoyed. Really annoyed. So, I drove home that night and sat down at my computer, telling myself, “I am going to find the official, indisputable, match-by-match breakdown of the last 30 Clásicos if it kills me.” This wasn’t about football love anymore; it was about proving a point and getting the facts straight for the record.
Wrestling with Historical Data
The first step was simple, but messy. I opened up a fresh spreadsheet—not some fancy data visualization tool, just a basic Excel sheet. I created four columns: Match Number (1 to 30), Date, Competition, and Scoreline. I had to make sure I was only counting competitive fixtures, meaning no summer exhibition tours. That instantly complicated things.
I started by searching for the most recent match and then worked backward. I couldn’t just trust a single “Head-to-Head” page because they often fudge the numbers or arbitrarily decide where the cutoff is. I had to manually verify each result.
My initial search involved diving deep into archives. I was scrolling through old news sites and official league tables from nearly a decade ago. This is where the work gets brutal. When you’re dealing with a rivalry this massive, they play each other in every tournament imaginable: La Liga, Champions League knockout rounds, Copa del Rey semis, Supercopa de España. Trying to keep the timeline straight was a serious headache.
I spent about three hours just collecting the initial 30 dates and results. But the real problem came when I tried to line up the dates chronologically. Because the matches are played in fits and bursts—sometimes three games in a month, sometimes a nine-month gap—my raw list looked like chaos. I had to sort everything based purely on the date column, from the oldest match (the 30th one back) to the newest. This process exposed my first major error: I had accidentally included a friendly match from 2017 that a lazy website had listed as a Supercopa game. I trashed that line and had to find and insert the true 30th match, which ended up being a league game from late 2014.
The Verification Grind and The Final Tally
Once I had the list of 30 games, the real hard labor began: verification. I cross-referenced every single scoreline with two different, reliable historical sports databases. If the sources didn’t match perfectly, I flagged the entry and had to find a third, official source—usually the official La Liga or UEFA result announcement—to settle the score.
This painstaking process took another entire evening. There was one particularly tricky stretch of games between 2016 and 2018 where they met in the Champions League group stage, a league game, and then a Copa del Rey final, all within a short span. I had to make absolutely sure I wasn’t double-counting or missing a critical fixture. I literally checked the minutes played for several games just to ensure I had the right game when the scorelines were similar.
Finally, I compiled the full, verified list. The moment I started tallying the W-D-L column for each side, I felt that satisfying click. The data was clean, accurate, and ready to share. I counted up the wins for Madrid, counted up the wins for Barcelona, and then tallied the draws.
This is what the final, undeniable record looks like. This is what eight hours of digging, cross-referencing, and spreadsheet work delivered:
- Total Matches Verified: 30 competitive fixtures.
- Real Madrid Wins: I counted 12.
- Barcelona Wins: I found 14.
- Draws: Just 4.
I sent the final screenshot to Mark. He hasn’t messaged me back yet, which tells you everything you need to know. Sometimes, the most important work we do is just cutting through the noise and settling arguments with hard, verifiable facts. And now I have this definitive record saved, ready for the next time someone opens their mouth at the pub.