Did you ever know Barcelona were once beaten 11-1 in El Clasico? It took place at the time when football was an ugly show in some way.
Back in 1943, Real Madrid beat Barcelona 11-1 in the second leg of the Copa del Rey (previously known as Copa del Generalisimo). The defeat became known as the biggest Barcelona loss to date.
However, this wasn’t a fair-play encounter.
Barcelona won the first-leg tie with a staggering 3-0 score. The players were full of confidence ahead of the second match, however, Spanish government intervened just before the kick-off
“Real Madrid never show off about that match,” Joan Barau, a historian specialising in Barcelona’s history, once told Goal. “Basically, because that wasn’t a football match.”
“That Real Madrid turned the tie around isn’t surprising. What is surprising is the result, which perfectly explains that it was, in reality, a humiliation; a spectacle more akin to what could be seen in a Roman circus than at a football match.”
At the time, Spain was under the dictatorship of Madrid-native Francisco Franco. After the government learned the first-leg result, they sent Franco’s director of state security to Real Madrid’s home stadium. The government official reportedly entered Barcelona’s locker room and threatened the players and their families.
“There was a Law of Political Responsibilities, by which anyone who was not loyal at the beginning of the regime was deemed suspicious,” Barau explains.
Real Madrid went on to dominate the game and score eleven goals in 90 minutes. Barcelona bagged just one (that came after the Blancos scored all eleven).
“It is remembered as the match of shame. A result that Real Madrid have never boasted about because it hides one of the worst ghosts from Spain’s darkest days.
“Those ‘warnings’ made some of the Barcelona players wonder if it was worth putting up any resistance at all, and, in the end, they didn’t.
“Because the game was to be much more than a sporting duel. It was all about teaching Barcelona a lesson and humiliating a club like no other that represented a way of thinking differently, much closer to the ideas of Catalanism.”
In October 2019, 99% of FC Barcelona club members voted to withdraw all distinctions awarded to Franco. The move was considered to be a ‘tribute’ to all those Barca club members who had to live through the difficult period of Franco’s dictatorship.
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