Barcelona host Real Madrid in El Clasico on Sunday, 25 October at 9pm local time, and the most senior visitor from Madrid will stop several levels short of the man who runs the club.
Florentino Perez will not travel to Barcelona. His absence extends into a third consecutive season and, together with the decision to send only Real Madrid’s vice-president as the club’s VIP representative, closes a protocol gap that has grown wider every year.
The pre-match working lunch between the two boards, a fixture of Clasico week for decades, will not take place. Sources at both clubs cited by Spanish newspaper Mundo Deportivo describe institutional relations as completely broken.
A step down from last season
Last season Real Madrid were represented at Camp Nou by honorary president Pirri, who sat alone in the directors’ box as the club’s only VIP delegate. This season the role passes to the vice-president, according to reporting picked up from Mundo Deportivo. There will again be no sit-down between Perez and Barcelona president Joan Laporta.
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Perez was proclaimed for an eighth term running to 2030 in June, so the policy of staying away from Camp Nou is set to outlast several more Clasicos.
The Negreira case still sets the temperature
The rupture dates to 2023, when it emerged that Barcelona had paid roughly €7.3m between 2001 and 2018 to companies linked to Jose Maria Enriquez Negreira, then vice-president of the Spanish federation’s Technical Committee of Referees. Barcelona have maintained the payments were for external technical reports on referees; former coaches told investigators they had never seen such reports.
A Spanish court dismissed a bribery charge against Negreira in May 2024, ruling he did not qualify as a public official. The sports-corruption investigation into the payments continues.
Real Madrid have run an unrelenting campaign on the case, filing as a private prosecutor and taking the dossier to UEFA. The pre-match board lunch, treated as untouchable for years, was the first casualty of that campaign. Perez’s personal boycott followed, and the two boards have not been in a room together since.
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What Sunday looks like off the pitch
The directors’ box will host Barcelona’s board with their invited guests. Tyler, the Creator will be among them, his GOLF brand carried on the front of the Barcelona shirt as part of a new partnership. Real Madrid’s vice-president will take his seat as the club’s sole representative.
Kick-off at Camp Nou is at 9pm local time.
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