British football thrives off local rivalries. The bad blood is the lifeblood of the game and the derby dates are the first matches that fans look for when the fixtures calendar comes out. But forget north London, don't bother with Merseyside, even Glasgow pales into relative insignificance - for the fiercest rivalry in world football is to be found in Spain.
Real Madrid and FC Barcelona hate each other with the bitter intensity of 1000 pickled lemons - and they always have done. When the two meet, it is much more than just a football match, although the reasons for the cat-and-dog synergy are so deep and shrouded in politics, they would be better debated over a San Miguel or 27.
The recent Beckham transfer shenanigans have done little to heal any long-standing breaches, but there are far more historic reasons why two of Europe's most welcoming and vibrant cities should be so given to mutual loathing. General Franco's ban of the Catalan language, to take but one example, served only to fuel the feelings of pride in difference and preserve the separatist traditions.
The politics, the pride, the passion, and not a little obsession, now generate enough 'news' to fill four football papers - Marca and AS in Madrid, Sport and El Mundo Deportivo in Barcelona - to report each player's waking moment. In July 2000, those papers went into overdrive about a certain Portuguese midfielder...
Luis Figo made possibly man's bravest decision since Basil Fawlty got down on one knee to Cybil: he agreed to move from Barcelona to Real Madrid. Think of Sol Campbell's defection from Spurs to Arsenal with all its burning effigies and Judas chants, and multiply the controversy by quite a lot.
When Figo returned to the Nou Camp three months after the most notorious transfer in Spanish football history, he was met by a barrage of abuse - which also included three mobile phones, a few half-bricks, a bike chain and a meteor shower of coins. In signing for Real, he counter-signed a death wish with Catalunya.
Barcelona may have got the then highest price ever fetched for a footballer in return, but where these clubs are concerned, money - even £37m - doesn't really matter. In competing first and foremost with each other, and then with the rest of Europe, Barca and Real have paid well over the odds for the best players and completely skewed the world transfer market which has now had enough and is on the point of crashing.
But even now, Real - who are fast becoming the Madrid Globetrotters - are trying to better their neighbours by sniffing around Ronaldo in the same summer that Barca have lost Rivaldo. Breaking the world record - and the bank - to sign players (though in practice it's usually a case of buy-now-pay-much-later) is worth the crippling debt if it leaves the other club limping behind.
Figo's transfer record lasted just a year. Real broke it again to sign Zinedine Zidane for £45m in 2001. And in this, Real's centenary year (which they seem to be making last 18 months), the addition of big Ron for even more seems only fitting. Not for Barca fans though. "100 anos de historia, 100 anos de escoria [100 years of history, 100 years of scum," read a banner at the last derbi.
The country pretty much stops twice a year for El Derbi, which is when the local players on both teams come to the fore, especially Barca, who have a strong Catalan core. This perhaps explains why they have not lost in the league to Real at the Nou Camp in 19 years, despite (whisper it) being the weaker side in recent years.
Madrid and Barcelona are modern, pluralist, cosmopolitan cities, but their football history ensures that their differences will never be forgotten.
