Carlo Ancelotti’s Real Madrid will play their first pre-season game next Sunday. It will be in England, against Bournemouth, a team that will compete in the Coca-Cola Championship, the second division of English football.
Playing English teams in preseason is a good sign of things to come historically for Real Madrid, as they have only lost two of the eight friendlies they’ve played against them in the last 13 years.
Curiously, those two losses had the same score: 1-0. In 2000, a Paul Scholes strike in the 89th minute gave Manchester United the victory in the semifinals of the friendly tournament that celebrated Bayern Munich’s centenary.
The other occasion in which Los Blancos kneeled down against an English team in a pre-season game was in 2008, when a Emmanuel Adebayor goal gave Arsenal a 1-0 triumph against Real at the Emirates Stadium, in the tournament that the Gunners host every summer before the start of the Premier League.
The rest of Real’s summer friendlies against English teams saw five victories (2-1 against Leicester City in 2011, 2-0 against Stoke City in 2007, 1-0 against Plymouth Argyle in 2006, 2-0 against Liverpool in 2002 and 2-1 against Middlesbrough in 2000) and a draw (0-0 against Fulham in 2006).
