Barcelona - Real Madrid

Barca's way of football forces teams to play like this.

This is how it goes: Valdes passes to either one of the flanking defenders. These ones pass back to the central defender. Central defender passes to flanking defending players again who pass it to the flanking midfielders. Those midfield player pass it back to the defence. In the mean time they make some meters up the field without any chance of losing the ball. Then they do constantly the same. They pass the ball to the midfield players xavi/iniesta. Then they exchange some sideways passing in midfield and look for a gap. (Because barca uses only 3 defenders, they have an extra player in midfield to pass the ball around. This way they can never lose the ball.) Against organised teams there aren't any gaps so they continue the midfield passing. Whenever a player (or multiple players) of the opposing team put pressure on them they pass it back to the central defenders and/or keeper, just to not lose the ball. If that happens the whole rebuilding proces begins again till the flanking defenders are high up the pitch and they force the opposition team to sit in a 'handball-set-up' around the penalty area. When a team like man united gets the ball, they move fast up the pitch and within a few passes they can create a goal opportunity whereas barca need 10min to get that goal opportunity.

Against weak teams there will always be gaps and so they win 4-0 but against organised teams they can't find it and you see the sideways passing and passing back to defence whenever they are under pressure. Barca only plays 100% safe passes so the opposition can never win it back. Only the last ball they play deep (mostly a stiff ball over the defence OR a ball towards the flanking players who play a ball through between keeper and defence OR a pass through to one of the running infiltrating attacking midfield players in the box) has any risk in it. It's ALWAYS like this. Seeing a few matches of that is nice, seeing 100 of them and it gets massively boring. It's ALWAYS the same build-up, always the same way they score goals. Almost never you see a fast build-up where the whole team moves fast up the pitch when they are in ball control, a counter-attack or any other way of playing football. When you watch any other team, you never have the feeling that they always do the same. With barca it is all so predictable that it gets boring.

But: With the quality players they have they CAN play sometimes fast, nice football like in the games against santos. Just sad they can't do that more.