A Spanish soccer game is 6 times bigger than the Super Bowl

Luis Suarez scores for Barcelona in Saturday night's clásico. ESPN photo. 

Cindy and I went to the closest neighborhood bar on Saturday night to do what most of the rest of Spain was doing, which was watching the two best soccer teams in Spain duke it out.

Barcelona whomped Real Madrid, 4-0, in what was supposed to be a close match, but that was almost beside the point.

Ronaldo and Real Madrid had a rough night. Getty Images via BBC

Barcelona and Real Madrid were playing a regular season game--they play twice, home and home--so it was not a playoff or final or anything special.

But their matches--which have so much history and drama that they are referred to as clásicos--regularly draw hundreds of millions of TV viewers.

First, the teams are rich and successful. Forbes ranks Barcelona and Real Madrid as the two most valuable sports franchises in the world. The BBC last year recounted the history of the 200-plus clásicos, and gave a sense of why they deserve the designation as classics. Similar to the Patriots-Giants or Red Sox-Yankees rivalries, but bigger.