ˇGOL!

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The team has even taken to building its publicity campaigns around this real-folks suffering, as I learned when I visited Atleti’s chirpy young PR department. Incredulous, I watched a series of ingenious award-winning TV spots. One featured a little kid asking, “Papá, why are we for Atleti?” and getting in response a far-off, misty, defiant stare. Another had a toil-weary immigrant from the Americas shown vérité-style, proudly donning the red-and-white shirt.

However! The forthcoming El Derbi looked to be a thriller—winnable, not just tieable! After years of fecklessness, Los Colchoneros were  playing exciting, aggressive football. Teen superphenom “Kun” Agüero (his nickname invokes boy characters in Japanese anime) had made up for the shocking loss of Fernando “El Niño” Torres, Atleti’s youthful icon, who’d galloped off to Liverpool. Real, leading the league, had jettisoned its unbearably glitzy galáctico model—which relied on a jumble of megastars like Beckham and Zidane—for a solid, more, dare I say, modest team approach. “No Soy Galáctico, Soy de Móstoles” (a Madrid suburb), insisted billboards featuring Iker Casillas, Real’s magnificent model-handsome goalkeeper, now rebranded as a regular, down-to-earth guy.

Crucially, Atleti would have home advantage at its famous Vicente Calderón Stadium, located near a brewery in a working-class neighborhood and “the most exciting place to watch in the country,” according to Lowe. I’d planned to go with Carlos Bardem, but he was away on the Andalusia coast shooting a movie. So I went to El Derbi with my girlfriend.

With whom I was having a big problem. At one time pro-Real, she’d been shamed into switching her allegiances to Barça. But she’d started to backslide. And now, approaching a stall, she suddenly cried, “Ooh, I want a Real scarf!”

“Are you nuts?” I rasped. “See anyone daring to wear a Real scarf?” Of course not. We were tramping along amid red-and-white throngs by an expressway that runs beneath the west stand of the stadium. Outside, on Paseo de los Melancólicos (“Melancholics’ Way”—I’m not making this up), the throngs thickened into hordes of bar-front beer gulpers and chant bellowers. Opulent Indian headdresses drifted by as if from a Buffalo Bill show (Los Indios is yet another Atleti moniker). Riot-helmeted cops on horseback kept watch, wrestling their rearing mounts as jokesters tossed firecrackers. “Still want a Real scarf?” I taunted.

Inside the deafening stadium, from our unenclosed press seats way on high, we could see the distant Francoist skyscrapers of Plaza de España in the dusk. Down below, a gargantuan banner unfurled over much of the area where the most hard-core supporters sat: an epic portrait of an older man, somehow familiar but hard to place. It was Marlon Brando from The Godfather, we learned later, accompanied by a garbled quote about hurting your enemies.

The players warmed up, and the crowd roared afresh. “ˇGuti Guti maricón!” they chanted, a stadiumful of voices gleefully bellowing a homophobic insult at Real’s blond pretty boy José Gutiérrez, who’d been photographed kissing a male friend on the lips. At least there were no monkey noises directed at the black players, as has happened here and at other stadiums. This in a country that responded to its 2004 terrorist bombings by actually liberalizing immigration policy. But, man, the Spanish are foulmouthed.

“I can’t tell who’s who!” my girlfriend said as the game kicked off. “What’s happening?” “Just—watch!” I yelled over the noise, as Atleti controlled the ball deep in their end, where it was stolen by Real’s boyish Brazilian Robinho (was it?), who passed—