Behind enemy lines

Real Madrid boast 1,800 supporters’ clubs but only one of those has set up home in Barcelona. Richard Fitzpatrick takes a Champions League coach trip with Madrid’s real fanatics

A STUDY by Harvard University in 2007 put Real Madrid’s global fanbase at over 228 million. The club has more than 1,800 peñas, or supporters’ clubs, across the world. Bizarrely, it has more of them in Catalonia than any other region. It’s odd, this rich sprinkling of Madridismo in the region, given Catalonia’s secessionist tendencies, a bit like finding Masonic Lodges on the Falls Road in Belfast or, as alluded to in the booklet, La Cataluña del Real Madrid, a mining camp in “Comanche territory”.

Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, has only one Real Madrid peña, though. I fetched up there just before midnight a couple of Mondays ago to catch an overnight bus with 60 rabid Real Madrid fans intent on travelling to France to watch their side’s first-leg Champions League last 16 encounter with Olympique Lyonnais, the side who knocked them out of the competition at the same stage this time last year.