Real Madrid vs Mallorca: hosts seek seventh win in seven in 2022/23
Against Mallorca on Sunday, Madrid will look to extend their winning start to the season to seven games, a streak they’ve only managed six times before.
Seven is the magic number for Real Madrid on Sunday: when they face Real Mallorca at the Bernabéu in week five of LaLiga, Los Blancos can make it seven wins out of seven at the start of a season for only the seventh time in the club’s history.
The Spanish and European champions have been victorious in all of their competitive games so far this term, winning four in the league, one in the Champions League and another in the UEFA Super Cup - a trophy that Madrid hope will be the first in a historic sextuple this season.
Los Blancos’ unblemished start to the campaign is one that none of the other 97 teams in the five major European leagues can boast of, and one that most other Madrid sides in the club’s 120-year history cannot lay claim to, either.
Real Madrid seek third-best start in club history
If Carlo Ancelotti’s men beat Mallorca at the Bernabéu, they will match the club’s third-best start to a season. According to soccer stats specialist Mister Chip, four previous Madrid campaigns share the bottom step of the podium.
The first came more than a century ago, in an era that predates LaLiga’s creation. In 1916-17, a side coached by Arthur Johnson won six out of six to secure the Campeonato Regional Centro (Central Regional Championship), a competition which brought qualification for the Copa del Rey. Madrid then began their Copa campaign by beating Sevilla in the first leg of the round of 16, before losing the return.
Madrid repeated the streak in 1931-32. Under coach Lippo Hertzka, Los Merengues managed seven consecutive wins in the Campeonato Mancomunado Centro-Aragón (Central-Aragón Joint Championship), played before the national top flight kicked off.
Three seasons later, Paco Bru’s Madrid also began with seven triumphs on the trot in the Campeonato Mancomunado Centro-Sur (Central-South Joint Championship).
More recently, Madrid posted a seven-out-of-seven start in Manuel Pellegrini’s single season in charge at the Bernabéu, in 2009-10. Sevilla ended that winning sequence with a 2-1 win at the Estadio Ramón Sánchez-Pizjuán, thanks to goals by Renato and Jesús Navas.
See also:
Madrid’s club-record start: 11 wins (twice)
While Real Madrid’s early-season winning streaks have been halted at seven on four occasions, there have been two campaigns in which they kept on racking up the victories.
Both came in the 1960s, a period in which Los Blancos utterly dominated LaLiga, lifting eight titles out of a possible nine. Under legendary coach Miguel Muñoz, the capital club began the 1961-62 and 1968-69 campaigns with 11 straight wins, sequences that were halted by Real Oviedo (in the league) and Rapid Vienna (in the European Cup), respectively.
Madrid on the march - you might be interested to know:
- On five of the six previous occasions that Real Madrid have begun a season with the six wins they currently have to their name, Los Blancos have ended up as LaLiga champions - most recently in 2016-16, under Zinedine Zidane.
- Current head coach Carlo Ancelotti is responsible for the longest winning streak in Real Madrid’s history. During the Italian’s first spell in charge of the club, the team won 22 competitive games in a row in 2014.