There was this really grea article before the Real vs Barça game, that might explain at least a bit why IMO they are something special... long but definitely worth reading
BARCELONA V REAL MADRID IS MUCH MORE THAN A FOOTBALL MATCH
The European Cup semi-final between Barcelona and Real Madrid is not a football tie, it's a war going back to the 1920s. Although Real have more than drawn first blood in the Nou Camp, Wednesday's second leg will be another bitter battle in Barça's quest to vanquish nationalist Spain. Chris Nawrat reports
THERE ARE derbies and there are derbies. But trying to understand the rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona through the prisms of Celtic versus Rangers, Liverpool versus Everton or Spurs versus Arsenal is a mistake. As Barça's motto makes clear, it is "more than a club".
Whenever Real step out on to the Nou Camp (Our Ground, in Catalan) they are not just facing a football team they are facing the whole of the Catalan nation. On Tuesday night they were greeted by a cacophony of sound and flares, plus myriad Catalan and Barcelona flags from the 95,000 Barça fans in the stadium, completely drowning out the 3,000 Real fans.
Outside there were another four million Catalans watching on television in bars, restaurants and in their homes, with flags and banners on their walls and hanging from their balconies. They were praying that the team which embodies their separatist aspirations would overcome the team which represents a succession of governments that have oppressed them. A point made clear by a huge banner in the stadium which read: "Catalonia is not Spain".
Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, a semi-autonomous province of Spain with its own language, flag and national anthem, all of which have, for long periods in the last 80 years, been banned by Madrid regimes. Any transgressions were heavily punished. Thus following Barça became the main political vehicle by which Catalans could express their hatred of central government, particularly during Franco's 46-year dictatorship.
Franco, a football obsessive himself - he even used to do the pools every week from the El Pardo palace - fully understood the Spanish passion for the game and tried to use it as a political tool. In the midst of the Civil War, Franco's generals took control of a number of the leading clubs, set up their own Spanish FA (recognised by Fifa) and launched a sports newspaper, 'Marca', designed to convert the mass following of football from left- wing politics to the right.
When Franco's fascist forces finally prevailed over the Republicans in 1939, the Spanish Cup was renamed the Generalissimo's Cup after the dictator. And Barça, who had narrowly survived the Civil War, came in for a pounding. The name was changed from "Football Club Barcelona" to "Barcelona Club de Futbol" to make it Spanish and not English; all board meetings and minutes had to be in Spanish, not Catalan; ditto all announcements at the ground.
As the Catalan flag was also banned - yellow and red stripes - Barça's crest had to be changed from four yellow and red bars to two. If the Francoistas had known the origin of Barça's distinctive blue and maroon shirts, they'd have changed them too. They are the colours of an Old Boy's rugby team of an English public school - Merchant Taylor's - chosen as a tribute to the Englishmen who helped found the club in 1899.
Then Franco's minions set about the board of directors, installing pro-Franco Catalans to quell any use of the club as a tool of the anti-Franco, pro-Catalonia resistance. With Barça's president, Josep Sunyol, and an elected deputy to the national parliament, already murdered by Franco troops outside Madrid at the start of the Civil War, there was little opposition.
Franco's secret police also used their secret files to vet potential club officials to weed out anybody who might not be pro the dictatorship. The first new president installed under Franco not only knew nothing about sport, he had never even seen a football match. Barça as a political Catalan icon was to be permanently neutered.
And Real Madrid - Franco's team - was to be deified. Officially. State-controlled Spanish television continually showed highlights of Real's matches and very little of Barça's, thus generating the notion among the populace that Real were Spain's team. A Franco stooge Barça president managed to 'lose' Alfredo Di Stefano to their arch rivals when they'd already signed him. Di Stefano went on to lead Real to five successive European Cup victories.
The Spanish referees were also got at in a regime of terror. Not only did they favour Real in any encounter with Barça, the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s were also littered with bizarre - and obviously biased - refereeing decisions in other matches involving Barça which cost them championships and Cups. The decisions were so appalling that eventually even a puppet Barça president had the temerity to complain to the Spanish College of Referees. He was ignored.
One of the most notorious incidents of Francoista interference occurred early on in the regime. In the second leg of the semi-final of Generalissimo's Cup in 1943 - Barça having won the first leg 3-0 - the Director of State Security came unannounced into the Barça dressing-room in Madrid and scared the living daylights out of them with veiled threats about their long-term personal safety. Barça promptly lost 11-1 to Real.
Real and the Franco-controlled Spanish Football Federation also played fast and loose with the signing of overseas players (then restricted to two per club) until Barça produced documentary evidence that a majority of the South American players with Spanish nationality actually had bogus passports. Of course, Barça had been denied this perk. The practice stopped when Barça threatened to reveal all.
Real's European successes were very useful to Franco. Snubbed by the United States and Western Europe because of his fascist dictatorship, Franco used the team as roving ambassadors to build diplomatic bridges to ease Spain's diplomatic and economic isolation. As one Franco Foreign Minister put it: "Real Madrid is the best embassy we ever had."
After Franco's death in November 1975, Barcelona - still worried about the repressive nature of the regime left behind - covertly organised a demonstration of Catalan nationalism a month later when they were playing Real in the Nou Camp. Seven hundred huge Catalan flags were smuggled into the stadium under the noses of the police. Just before kick-off, the stadium was awash with yellow and red.
It was the first public display of Catalan defiance since the dictator's death. And Barça's winning goal that day was scored in the last minute by Charly Rexach, today the Barça coach. This goes some way to explaining why he said, before these semi-final matches, that beating Real in the semis was more important than winning the European Cup itself. And why the Spanish called it: the Duel of the Century.
The English have a long association with the club going back to its inception in 1899 providing a host of coaches. In modern times Terry Venables and Bobby Robson coached them. Gary Lineker played for them. As did Scottish Steve Archibald and Welsh Mark Hughes. (They would be seen as English by the Catalans).
All of them had never experienced anything like being part of Barça, especially against Real. "It is the only fixture in the world which draws more than 100,000 fans twice a year," Robson said in 1997. "Throw into that equation all the history, the politicking and the media attention, and you're looking at a powder keg."
When Lineker climbed the six steps that lead to the pitch for his first Barça-Real derby the sound overwhelmed him. "This is no derby," he recalled, "this is Catalonia against the rest of Spain, and I'm one more soldier in the Catalan army."
When Venables clinched the Spanish championship in an away game with Barça he was more than overwhelmed. "When we arrived at the airport and got into the bus, there were so many people that a journey that should have taken 25 minutes took seven hours," he remembers. "It was incredible, as if we were the triumphant army that had returned after achieving the impossible.
"It brought home to me that the suffering of the past was something that had stuck these people together, through generations. I felt it had nothing to do with sport at all." Som mes que un club. More than a club.
Forty years ago Barça were the first team ever to knock out the five-times unbeaten champions of Europe, Real. Tuesday's defeat was the first time Real had won in Nou Camp for over 18 years. There is some history between these clubs.
In Steve McManaman's words: "The second leg will be a corker. The fact that we're 2-0 up, doesn't necessarily mean it's all over."
Nor the war.
As the Communist Catalan detective novelist and literary intellectual, Manuel Vazquez Montalban put it: "If Real Madrid didn't exist, someone would have had to invent it."
There is wonderful account of the history of the club in: Barça, a people's passion (Bloomsbury) by Jimmy Burns for those who wish to know more.
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. Sooo.... I'll just assume that this is 1 of those :thumb: 
moved to barca, there is some kind of a tradition for the ajax players (and not only) to go there. the team has got some dutch trainers as the same cruijff 
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real forever, maybe my most-hated team after man utd and bayern munich