Exactly one year ago today, Real Madrid Femenino appeared to be on the precipice of a new era. After five years of institutional disinterest and mediocre results, Las Blancas had at last achieved a feat worthy of the club it had until then borne in name only. Back then, in the first leg of its Champions League quarterfinal, Madrid welcomed Arsenal onto its swampy pitch and upset the Gunners, 2-0. Madrid then one-upped itself the following weekend, outplaying and beating the mighty Barcelona for the first ever Blanca Clásico victory. Those two triumphs, easily the biggest wins in the club's short history, were laudable in their own right, but were most important for the implicit promise within them: the idea that maybe, finally, Real Madrid was ready to cast off its self-imposed restraints and start the work of becoming the kind of team it could and should be. One year on, it's now clear that, unfortunately though unsurprisingly, the club's actual fate has not proven so inspirational.
Real Madrid wasted little time popping the bubble of hope it had done so well to create back in March of 2025. A couple days after that Clásico win, Real flew to London and got summarily thumped by Arsenal in the quarterfinal return leg, 3-0. Ousted from the Champions League, they then capitulated in the run-in of the Liga F title race that the unexpected Clásico win had gotten them back into. This season has been a turn to unremarkable form. Las Blancas are once again a lock to finish second in the league, but have never been serious challengers to Barcelona's domestic crown. Their Champions League form has been decent, earning them entry into the quarterfinals via a win over Paris in a play-in tie, but Real's European story will once again end at that stage of the tournament. There have been four subsequent Clásicos since that potentially transformative one last March, and Barcelona has won each and every one of them, by a cumulative score of 16-2. The most recent Spanish Derby came on Wednesday in the UWCL quarterfinal, where Barcelona plastered Madrid, in Madrid, by a score of six goals to two.