Barcelona host Real Madrid amid angst over referee payment scandal

T he battle for the glorious past will be fought in the inglorious present. And it will be fought with heavily edited Twitter videos. Early last week Real Madrid TV released what can only be described as an attack video, aimed at the former La Liga referee José María Enriquez Negreira. If this seems a little extreme, it is worth noting this was in fact a follow-up, sequel to Real Madrid TV’s previous attack video aimed at referee Carlos Clos Gómez, now head of La Liga VAR.

There have been grander, starrier, more knife-edge meetings between Barcelona and Real Madrid. But not many have been more strangely pitched than Sunday night’s clásico at the Camp Nou, or more obviously fraught with angst, mudslinging and paranoia.

The game itself will either decide the title race or inject a little late-breaking life. Defeat would cut Barcelona’s lead at the top to six points with 12 matches to go, which still looks like a lot of points. The gap from Barcelona to Atlético Madrid in third place was a muscular 17 going into this weekend. Squint and it could almost be the grand old days of the global duopoly, when the bloom of the Messi-Ronaldo years made this fixture football’s grandest single event.

But this isn’t quite that. Instead this is a fixture that will be played out to the sound of the recent past being angrily divvied up. The European Super League fiasco had seemed to heal the old wounds in the name of pursuing common interests, with reports of Joan Laporta and Florentino Pérez being seen regularly taking dinner together. The latest from Barcelona is that Laporta is considering cancelling the traditional pre-clásico lunch. Instead La Liga’s two most powerful clubs seem intent on eating one another.

The spark for all this