By the end of Laliga’s Matchday 20 games, defending champions Real Madrid had overtaken their city rivals, Atletico Madrid, at the top of the 2024/2025 Spanish league table with 46 points, two points more than Diego Simeone’s men and 7 points more than Hansi Flick’s ‘high-flying’ Barcelona.
While this circumstance might not be news or strange in any ordinary Spanish league season, it is in this particular one because this Real Madrid team had just a week or so ago suffered an embarrassing 5-2 defeat to Barcelona.
Yes, that was in another competition, the final of the Spanish Super Cup, but seeing as it wasn’t the first time this season (Barca also beat Madrid 4-0 at the Bernabeu in Laliga), and that the same Real Madrid could not also beat Atletico Madrid in Laliga when the two met at the Metropolitano earlier this season (drew 1-1), the weirdness of their leading the table becomes clear.
In this article, we analyse why this is the case by answering the question, is Real Madrid being top of Laliga credit to Carlo Ancelotti and his team or is it down to Barcelona and Atleti, both of whom were top of the league at one point, bottling their chances of keeping their lead?
🤍Real Madrid’s League🏆 Season in Numbers🔢: Good, Bad or Average?❓
💯Unbeaten at Home🏠:
Real Madrid ended the 2023/2024 Laliga season without suffering a defeat at the Santiago Bernabeu and that included games against their title rivals, Barcelona and Atletico Madrid.
However, this season, with only 20 league games played, the Galacticos have already lost at home and not to just any other opponent than their biggest rivals, Barca and by a huge scoreline, 0-4.
❌Worst Laliga 🕜Start in 4 Season4️⃣:
After the first 17 games of the 2024/2025 Laliga season, Carlo Ancelotti’s team had accrued just 37 points, from a possible 51, making their worst start in the league in four seasons, with the last time they did worse being the 2019/2020 season (36 points).
To give you a better perspective on how bad this is, in the last 13 years, Real Madrid has had just six (6) of such bad Laliga beginnings, and this season in part of those six worst Laliga starts for the Los Blancos.
The others are the 2017-18 season when they amassed only 29 points after their first 17 league games, the 2018-19 season where they got only 31 points after 17 league games, the 2012-13, 2015-16, and 2019-20 seasons, where they managed only 36 points each in their first 17 games.
In addition to this, the last time Real Madrid lost 5 games in the first part of the season (from August to December) was the 2020/2021 season and this season.
🔒Clean Sheet Monsters🔒:
Last season, Real Madrid had the most clean sheets in not only the Spanish Laliga but in the entire European top five leagues, (21). However, at the halfway point this season, Ancelotti’s team could only boast eight (8) clean sheets.
🎈El Clasico Victories: The Best Morale Booster🎈
In Real Madrid’s Laliga-winning 2023-24 season, another thing that stood out about them was their clean sweep of all three El Clasico games they played against arch-rivals Barcelona in all competitions.
This is the biggest game in club football in the entire world, and winning it, as history has shown, can more than increase the confidence of the winning team exponentially, and then again there are the 3 points one would be taking from their biggest title challenger.
So the benefits of winning the El Clasico cannot be understated in Spanish football, and Real Madrid more than won their Clasicos, beating Barca 1-2 at their new makeshift home in their first league meeting, then 4-1 in the final of the Spanish Super Cup, before closing it out with a 3-2 win at the Bernabeu in the second league encounter.
This season, however, things have taken a very contrasting turn for Madrid as they are the ones being hammered left and right by their Baulgrana rivals, first in the league at the Bernabeu (4-0) and then the recent one.
🟣Barca & Atelti🔴: Bottling Experts✔️ or Just Not ❌Good Enough?
Now let’s move on from zeroing in on the defending champions and talk about their title challengers in Hansi Flick’s Barca and Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid. Did they bottle it?
🟣Barca & Flick Ball⚽:
Barcelona sacked Xavi Hernandez as their manager after last season and brought in Hansi Flick to take over as manager and so far one would say that it has been a great ride since the German took over but has it?
While yes Flick had led Barca to a title already this season in the Spanish Super Cup, one Xavi could not win last season (he won the league for them in his first season though), and gotten some huge wins (Bayern 3-0, Real Madrid 4-0, Real Madrid 5-2), Barcelona are not really conquering every competition.
Barcelona led the Spanish league table in the earlier on in the season, stretching Atletico by 6 points and Real Madrid by 4 points at one point this season (after 6 games) but at the moment they find themselves third (3rd) behind both Madrid clubs.
The Baulgrana’s European season is going a whole lot better than their other two rivals, having already secured qualification to the next round of the UEFA Champions League (UCL) and that is commendable.
Yet, despite this, Barca has lost to teams like Las Palmas, Leganes CD, Monaco, and league title rivals, Atletico Madrid this season.
Aside from this, Hansi Flick’s Barca boasts only 39 points after 20 games this season, a figure so much below the 44 points and 53 points Barcelona gathered after the same number of games under Xavi in his two full seasons in charge of the Spanish club.
🔴Atletico Madrid & Simeone🗣️:
Diego Simeone has won the Spanish Laliga twice (13/14 & 20/21) with Atletico Madrid and has finished runner-up with them a couple of other times, now while he is not as under pressure as his other two counterparts in Real Madrid and Barcelona to lift titles, Simeone has his own expectations.
Among those expectations is that, in a season like this one where both Real Madrid and Barca do not seem to have their affairs in order on the pitch as they normally do, he and his Atletico de Madrid team are expected to pounce.
However, they have so far failed to do that. While they spent a couple of days as the Spanish league leaders, that lead has since been annulled by Real Madrid.
Atletico made waves in the 2024/25 summer transfer window bringing in Julian Alvarez from Man City, Cornor Gallagher from Chelsea and Alexander Sorloth from Villarreal, making a statement of intent ahead of the season so it’s safe to say those expectations were high.
In some ways, Atletico Madrid has seen some improvement in the team. Aside from looking set to finish better than the 4th they finished last season, Simeone’s men have already done better in many areas than they did last season.
For instance, Atletico Madrid was in the top three for only two league stats metrics last season, Big Chances Missed (2nd with 71 big chances missed) and Shots on Target per Match (3rd with 5.4 shots on target per match).
This season, however, Simeone’s men are in the top three for Goals Conceded Per Match (1st with 0.7), Clean Sheets (2nd with 10), and Big Chances Missed (3rd with 36).
Aside from this, Atletico, who lead Barca on the league table, also beat Flick’s men 1-2 in their first meeting this season in the league, something which is very different from what happened last season when they were beaten at home and away by Barcelona.
🔚Conclusion🔚:
From the look of things, it seems Carlo Ancelotti’s Real Madrid is first on the Spanish league table not because they are performing at a very high level, but because Barcelona and Atletico Madrid are bottling what is supposed to be an easy league title for either one of them.
You can check out the Spanish Laliga games of Real Madrid, Barca and Atletico Madrid here on MSport.
#Laliga #RealMadrid #AtleticoMadrid #Barcelona #Ancelotti #Flick #Simeone
