For an unhealthy number of seasons now, Spanish football's hierarchy has consisted of just two clubs.
You know who they are. So, when, on Thursday, Spain's professional players' trade union declared their intention to go on strike for the scheduled opening fixtures of the new 20-team Liga programme over various aspects of their working conditions, it did not take long for cynics to wonder how much it mattered.
After all, they suggested, Real Madrid and Barcelona's home-and- away games in the Super Cup this week go ahead, broadcast to 147 countries. Besides, the sceptics added, by the time the league calendar does start, Madrid versus Barca will be the sole games relevant to the outcome of the title.
Last May, the third-placed finisher in La Liga, Valencia, sat 21 points behind runners-up Madrid. And that represented an improvement. The gap between the two clubs, again in the silver and bronze positions, had been 25 points in 2009/10. The space between first and second had also tightened: Madrid were only three points shy of Barcelona at the finish, a point closer than a year earlier.
Eroding that distance is Madrid head coach Jose Mourinho's obsession, his raison d'etre at least for the next nine months of the Portuguese's carefully planned and very successful career. Though it may seem perverse to say so only three months after Barcelona completed a league and European Cup double that featured a semifinal victory over Madrid in the Champions League, Mourinho's Madrid do have a menacing momentum as they focus on that task.
The concentrated quartet of bilious encounters from last April and May, in which the teams met in the league, the Spanish Cup and in the home-and-away legs of the Champions League in the space of 18 days are fresh in the memory but still open to all manner of interpretations. Madrid won one of them, the Cup final, and drew two others, losing over 90 minutes only in the first leg of the European tussle. In three of those epics, Madrid had a man sent off. After the third of the series, Mourinho himself collected a touchline ban that would effectively last, in European matches, for six months.
Which partly explains why a more diffident, circumspect Mourinho has stalked Madrid's training facility as well as stadiums across the US, Europe and China during the club's expansive summer tours. They won all seven of their preparatory friendlies, their best close-season record for 24 years and will have noted that Barcelona lost two of their exhibition games.
Madrid have recruited more heavily than their rivals. As usual, Mourinho has shopped in his native Portugal, committing more than R300-million on Fabio Coentrao, the blond left back who can operate as an "inside-out" winger, a device favoured by Mourinho. Nuri Sahin, the young Turkish attacking midfielder from Borussia Dortmund, is not yet fit enough to compete for a place with Mesut Ozil or Kaka .
"We have some new, alternative lines of argument we didn't have before," said Mourinho of the additions to his squad.
It was a telling figure of speech from the serially argumentative coach. Mourinho is pleased to have won several internal arguments after a year in charge - he now occupies the post of Madrid's sporting director, as well as head coach - and will continue to argue that the way to beat Barca is not by trying outpass the world's best passing team, but by other means.
No side where Cristiano Ronaldo represents the sharpest weapon will abandon a strategy of counter-attack; a great deal of work over the summer has also focused on set-pieces. Beyond all its captivating ferocity, Spain's great enmity fascinates because Madrid's football seems so different from Barca's. It may not be so far away from being as effective.
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