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Only four clubs are crowned with Spain champions eight or more. Real Madrid and Barcelona are a dominant couple, but Atletico Madrid has broken that Duopol twice lately, while the athletic club has been more successful than each other side in the country.
This season, only six points separates them as the main four in the La Liga title race, and Atletico and Athletic go to the head in Riyadh Air Metropolitano on Saturday night.
Chances of Athletic to ask for the shocked first Spanish title since 1984 have been slender, but the win in the capital would at least hold them firmly in combination and well on their way to qualifying for the Champions League for the first time in 11 years. However, the victory in the other way, for Atletico, would just remove the side of Bilbao from the title race and left a three -way fight moving towards running.
It is a huge amount. But this is not just the story of two clubs locked in competitive rivalry this season. Their history is basically connected and extends far more than a century.
Have you ever wondered why these two clubs have similar names and colors? There is a reason.
Bilbao was the main place for one of the oldest football clubs in Spain, which he performed in 1898. The game arrived from the UK in the second part of the 19th century, usually from the domain of English or Scottish immigrants or local students returning home, and more prevailing in port cities in the north, west, such as Bilba, such as Bilb. The latter really boasts the oldest Spanish official football club – recreational de Huelva, once in La Liga – founded in 1889.
Juan Astorquia studied in Manchester, and after returning home, he was one of the seven members of the founder of what became an athletic club – an Anglicated name nodded to the original English influence, which remained almost 130 years later. It was only briefly “Atletico” under the oppressive Franco regime.
Football grew in its infancy when people who knew and loved the game took him with them to other places. So when there were three students from Bilba who live in Madrid, they were just witnessing an athletic club to beat Copa del Rey from 1903. In the capital just weeks earlier, they decided to create their own club their hometown, the Madrid Athletic Club was born.
Today we obviously know the team as Atletico Madrid. This changed only from athletic 37 years later, when in 1940, General Dictator Franco banned a foreign language in the names of the clubs. But where the athletic club returned to its origin when the regime ended in 1975, Atletico Madrid stuck.
In his core, Atletico started as a Madrid Athletic Club branch. But although the teams split after Spanish football was increasingly formalized in the 1920s, with the eventual foundation of La Liga 1929, their familiar colors will always be a symbol of that common story.
The original colors of the athletic club and then Atletico after extension were blue-white, and the kits were donated by the resident of Bilbao Juan Moser in 1902. Seven years later, Athletic went in search of replacement blue and white broken T -shirts, hoping that the player and board member Juan Elorduy would be able to buy in the style of the Crlack Vodina Club.
Elorduy was unsuccessful in obtaining a set of his short drafts. But after arriving at Southampton, ready to board a ferry home in Bilbao, it hit him that the local football club wore shirts – red and white stripes – which corresponded to the colors on the flag of his hometown.
Before sailing home, Elorduy was able to buy 50 red and white shirts, half of which was sent to a sister club in Madrid after landing back to Spain. But one last thing. At that moment, Athletic opted for new black shorts, while Atletico kept the same blue they wore before, which explains a subtle difference in their straps that still exist today.
