What is the history of Alavés vs FC Barcelona chronology? Key events explained easily.

Alavés and Barcelona aren’t really long-time rivals. One is from the Basque region, a small-town team; the other is from Catalonia, a world-class powerhouse. They don’t play each other often, but every time they meet, there’s always a bit of spark. I wasn’t sure when their first match was either. Some say 1921, others say 1930.After some research, I found that the early match records were a mess, with many written by local newspapers, so they couldn’t be fully trusted.

In 2003, Alavés faced Barcelona in the Copa del Rey. The match didn’t attract much attention, but something strange happened on the field.Rivaldo, then Barcelona’s star player, was preparing to take a throw-in near the touchline when a fan in the stands threw an orange at him, hitting him squarely on the head. The entire stadium froze, then erupted into laughter. The scene was later turned into a meme and circulated on Spanish football forums for years. Although Barcelona won the match, what everyone remembered was the “orange incident.”

The most heated match between the two teams was the 2001 UEFA Cup semi-final. At that time, Alavés was still a mid-table La Liga team, but they managed to fight their way into the last four of European competition.They never faced Barcelona in an official match, but the media always confused this with another match—some people insisted that Barcelona’s B team played against Alavés in the Copa América in 1998, but this was a case of mistaken identity. The Copa América is a national team competition, not a club competition. There is a lot of misinformation like this online, which is headache-inducing.

The most frustrating part of researching is when the numbers don’t match. For example, in a 1996 league match, one website says 15,000 people attended the Mendizorroza Stadium, while another says 9,500. That’s almost half the difference! I had to find old photos, count the number of people in the stadium, and estimate. Someone also tweeted that Messi scored three goals against Alavés in a certain match, but upon checking the schedule, he didn’t even play in that game.A lot of the “memories” on the internet are actually made up by fans, and if you believe them, you’re likely to get confused.

I used sticky notes to organize the timeline, and my desk was covered with them. I divided it into three sections: early years, European highlights, and recent promotions and relegations.I had everything organized up to 2017 when Alavés was promoted to La Liga, but then my cat jumped up and knocked everything off the table with one swipe. The papers were scattered everywhere, and I spent nearly an hour picking them up. When I reorganized them, I realized that the first match after the resumption of the season was on April 2, not March 30. Thanks to this mess, I corrected an error.

Official data is cold and impersonal, but the details that fans remember are vivid. I saw a post on a Spanish forum saying that someone skipped his sister’s wedding to watch Alavés play in the European Cup in 2001, and his family nagged him about it for more than a decade.Someone else recalled taking a bus to Barcelona to watch a game when they were a child, and the bus broke down on the way back, so they were stuck on the side of the road eating cold bread. These stories are more heartwarming than the scores, so I included them in my article.

Alavés has been on a roller coaster ride in recent years, rising and falling, then rising again.In 2016, they beat Barcelona once, defending fiercely throughout the game and winning 1-0 in an upset. But they were relegated at the end of the season. Only small teams can afford to “beat the big teams but lose the league.” Now, when they face Barcelona, they are basically beaten away from home, but they still give it their all every time they play at home.

Today I posted an old photo of fans throwing oranges during a match. Within hours, three comments popped up: “Those weren’t oranges, they were small apples!” “The match started at 7 PM, not 8 PM!” “Rivaldo wasn’t angry at all; he was smiling.” See? Even if the details are wrong, as long as it sparks a conversation, the article wasn’t written in vain.