Athletic Club vs Real Madrid head to head record and key numbers

Okay team, grab a coffee, today was deep into the numbers game. Wanted to really understand that Athletic Club versus Real Madrid history, not just glance at a headline. You know how it is, headlines tell you nothing.

Starting Simple, Finding the Raw Stuff

First thing, gotta find where the real data lives. Pulled up my browser, you know the drill, just started typing basic searches like “Athletic Club Real Madrid all matches”. Looked through a bunch of sites that popped up. Found a few decent ones listing results going way back, like old school league tables and cup matches. Copy-pasted years, competition names, scores, home/away, everything into a fresh notes file. Felt messy, but gotta start somewhere.

Then I remembered, wait, got that big football database project I’ve been slowly building on my local machine? Fired up SQL, connected to my little database. Wrote this basic query, just grabbing home team, away team, home goals, away goals, the date, filtering for Athletic Club vs Real Madrid specifically. Ran the query, watched those rows pop up. Had to manually check a few against my notes, just to be safe. Numbers matched up mostly. Always catch one or two old matches listed differently somewhere else. Annoying. Fixed ’em.

The Math Part (Sigh)

Okay, raw data sitting there in the text file and the DB view. Time for the calculator app and probably screw up some numbers. Needed totals: games played, wins for Athletic, wins for Real Madrid, draws.

• Totals first: Just counted each row. Athletic wins? Counted those. Madrid wins? Counted those. Draws? Yeah, those too. Wrote it down. Then checked against another source’s summary. Close, mine was one win less for Athletic. Grr. Found the mistake: misread an old season result. Corrected it.
• Goals: Scrolled through my query view again, focusing just on home goals, away goals. Typed Athletic goals: SUM(away_goals) where they were away? No, hold on. Messed it up. Brain fart. Realized I needed both home AND away goals for Athletic. Got the SQL straight: SUM((CASE WHEN home_team = 'Athletic Club' THEN home_goals ELSE away_goals END)). Ran that, got the number. Same for Madrid. Then goal difference per team? Simple subtraction later. Wrote it all down.

Spotting the Weird Bits

With the big totals out of the way, I got curious about recent times. You hear stuff like “Athletic’s stadium is tough.” So, pulled just the La Liga games since say, 2010. Filtered the query for league games after 2010. Counted matches played at Athletic’s ground. Compared the win rates there to the overall historical stats. Also checked draws specifically. Honestly, that home advantage? It felt bigger in my head. Their win rate is better at home recently compared to overall, but not earth-shatteringly so against Madrid.

Double-checked, looked at the wins. Madrid still get wins at Athletic’s place more often than most teams do. Confirmed the numbers didn’t lie.

Wrapping It Up

By this point, the keyboard felt sticky (thanks coffee), eyes tired. Had the core stuff: total games, wins/losses/draws, total goals, goals per game average, recent home form tidbit. Created a new markdown file in my project notes folder. Typed out the key findings in simple points:

• Overall Totals: X games played, X Athletic wins, X Madrid wins, X draws. Madrid dominate.
• Goals Galore: Athletic scored Y, Madrid scored Z. Madrid scored way more.
• Goals Per Game: Simple average? Total goals / total games. Came out around # per game. Higher than I expected.
• Recent Home Quirk: Since 2010 in La Liga at Athletic, X wins for them, which is better than their overall average, but still behind Madrid overall.

Stared at it for a minute. Hit save. Felt good to dig it out myself. Numbers tell stories, but you gotta dig ’em up properly.