MADRID, 2 Ago. (EUROPA PRESS) –
FC Barcelona and Real Madrid face each other this Saturday at the Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey in the traditional pre-season summer Clásico, which always promises to be tense despite not being an official match, and which this year will be marked by being the first duel on the benches between Hansi Flick and Carlo Ancelotti, with some of the stars of both teams still on vacation.
A Clásico is always a Clásico, whether it’s in the League, Champions League, Copa del Rey, Super Cup or, in this case, in the summer pre-season. For the third consecutive pre-season, the two giants of Spanish football will face each other in the summer on North American soil. This time it will be the Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey, with a capacity of 82,566 spectators, that will host the duel. A match that will mark Hansi Flick’s debut in a Clásico.
The duel between the coaches is the main focus of the match, as just a few months after becoming the new coach of FC Barcelona, Flick will face his biggest rival. It will therefore be the first match in which Ancelotti and the German coach face each other, and they will do so in charge of the two best clubs in Spanish football.
On the one hand, Flick will try to impose a high intensity in attacking play, as well as a high pressure without the ball, in which his team changes to a 4-4-2 to further hinder the opponent. Meanwhile, Ancelotti, who used a 4-4-2 in the match against Milan, could opt for the first time in a long time for a 4-3-3 with the complete Brazilian trident – Vinícius, Endrick and Rodrygo.
A match that Barça arrives at after a 2-2 draw against Manchester City on American soil with a team in which the youth players were the protagonists. Against the Premier League champions, Flick gave many minutes to youngsters such as Pau Victor, scorer of one of the goals for Barça, Marc Casado, Héctor Fort and Marc Bernal, all of them starters against City, in a match in which Lewandowski had 30 minutes of play.
Real Madrid, meanwhile, lost to Milan (1-0) in their opening game of the American tour, in a match in which Endrick made his debut. Unlike Barça, the white team does have more first-team players, so the squad of youth players against the ‘rossonero’ team was smaller, with Mario Martín being the only starter, as well as the most prominent.
In addition, for the summer Clasico, Ancelotti will be able to count on Brazilians Vinícius, Militao and Rodrygo, who joined training during the week and will have their first minutes of pre-season against the Blaugrana team. The one who will not be there is the youth player César Palacios, who suffered a serious knee injury against Milan and will miss the first half of the season.
A Clásico that, despite not having the full squads of both teams, will serve to evaluate the moment in which both teams find themselves facing a demanding start to the season. For Real Madrid, the match comes just 10 days before they play the first title of the season, the European Super Cup against Atalanta, while the Catalans will debut at Mestalla in less than two weeks.
In terms of competition, Real Madrid will be looking to continue their good run against FC Barcelona, against whom they have won their last three encounters, with their last defeat coming in last year’s pre-season match (0-3). And that is one of the pending issues for Ancelotti’s men, who have been defeated on both occasions that both teams have faced each other during the pre-season in the United States – 0-1 in 2022 and 0-3 in 2023.
The bad news for the more than 82,000 spectators who will pack the stands of the Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey is that they will not be able to enjoy the European champions Dani Carvajal, Pedri, Ferran Torres, Lamine Yamal, Fermín López, the Olympian Pau Cubarsí, or the French Camavinga, Tchouaméni, Mendy and Kylian Mbappé, nor the Englishman Jude Bellingham or the Uruguayan Fede Valverde, all of them still on vacation.