West Bromwich Albion's derby against Wolverhampton Wanderers in the FA Cup this weekend (stream all games live on ESPN+) begins at an unusually early hour, at 11:45 a.m. on Sunday. “Early?” Barça could respond to that. “Hold my gazpacho.”
That's because it's the earliest professional football game to ever start, or should that be the latest? — was at the Camp Nou in September 2003 when Barça faced Sevilla in LaLiga at 00:05 on a Wednesday.
A party atmosphere was created. Three tenors performed before the game, there were free KitKats and cups of gazpacho (a cold soup made with a mixture of vegetables) for the 80,237 fans present and Ronaldinho scored his first goal for Barça. The Brazilian, who was making his home debut after signing from Paris Saint-Germain, took the ball from his own half and smashed it into the underside of the crossbar to make it 1-1 at around 01:30 local time.
But why did all of this happen in the early hours of the morning, when most people had to wake up for work or school a few hours later?
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Well, the Spanish league had scheduled the second round of matches that season to be played midweek before the September international break, leading to most teams playing from Saturday to Tuesday before their players left to join to their respective countries.
However, Barça and Sevilla were unable to agree on a time slot for their match. Sevilla were unable to postpone their weekend match, saying tickets had already been printed and sent for Sunday, and also ruled out playing on Monday or Tuesday as it would fall within 48 hours of the previous match.
Seeing the opportunity to face a weakened Barça without their internationals, they also refused to reschedule the match for later in the campaign.
“LaLiga put the game on a Wednesday, but that meant that Ronaldinho would have left to sign for Brazil,” said Sandro Rosell, then Barça vice president, in the documentary “The Happiest Man in the World.”
“We thought: 'Ufff, we're going to lose without him,' so we pushed for Tuesday with LaLiga. They said no. And then we came up with the idea of playing on Wednesday five minutes after midnight. It was crazy, but we're thinking that we have to do it because we need Ronaldinho.
The club reviewed the sporting statutes and legislation to see if it was possible and, once they had the green light, “La Noche del Gazpacho”, as it is known locally, was born.
“I remember that before we had a very long nap because the game started very late,” former Barça player Sergio Santamaría told ESPN. “And also the excitement of doing something at that moment. It was the same as when you were little and you didn't have school because you had something special on.
“It felt a little bit like that, unusual, that's what we felt about the fact that we were playing after midnight. It was different because it wasn't a normal start time. It was hard to sleep afterwards!”
But not everyone agreed. “I still think it doesn't make sense,” Joaquín Caparrós, Sevilla's coach from 2000 to 2005, told reporters before the game. “It's bad for football.”
Concerned about the lack of fans, Barça devised different ways to convince them to attend the game. They kept the club museum open until midnight, played music by three tenors and distributed 100,000 KitKats, 40,000 cups of gazpacho, 30,000 Actimel yogurts, 25,000 bags of Doritos, bread and ham. The response was a crowd of more than 80,000 people.
However, things didn't start very well. Ronaldinho was available, but Barça were deprived of their Dutch internationals (Phillip Cocu, Patrick Kluivert, Michael Reiziger, Marc Overmars, Giovanni van Bronckhorst) and soon fell behind when José Antonio Reyes gave Sevilla a 10th-minute lead from the penalty spot. .
“'my mother [my mother]'I'm thinking,' Rosell added. 'After everything we've done and now we're going to lose.'
But as Ronaldinho joked in the documentary: “Things couldn't go wrong. Midnight is when I regain control.”
The retired star, now 43, was referring to the headlines he made during his time at Barça for his love of the city's nightlife, but on this occasion it was a completely different bar to the one he went to at dawn. Picking up the ball just inside his half, he beat defenders José Luis Martí and Francisco Casquero before unleashing an unstoppable shot that bounced off the crossbar and over the line just after midnight.
“He dribbled, dribbled, dribbled and then boom,” remembers Toni Juanmartí, a Diario Sport journalist who was at the game. “It was an incredible night and an incredible moment. I still remember perfectly the explosion after the goal. When he shot, it was one of those where you think: 'What are you doing…?' And then chaos.”
There will be no free cakes or chocolate at Hawthorns on Sunday morning. However, there is a chance someone will write his name into the Black Country derby history books when the two old rivals meet for the first time since 2021.
