Real Madrid and FC Barcelona: A new narrative of football rivalry in 1930s Spain

By creating a new and more complex interpretation of Spain in the 1930s, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which the rivalry between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona- a rivalry rooted not only in two opposing football identities, but also in historical tensions between Castilla and Catalunya, Spanishness and Catalanism, and central nationalism and peripheral autonomy- has been simplified and ultimately reduced to two antithetical political identifications.