Barcelona Beats Sporting Gijon But Still 10 Points Behind Madrid

Week 26 of the Spanish League took place on the weekend of 3rd and 4th march 2006, with Real Madrid going into the weekend a full ten points clear of FC Barcelona, the previous year's title holders and bitterest rival. Madrid was to face the second team of the city of Barcelona, Espanyol, at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium in Madrid, while FC Barcelona was to play host to Sporting Gijon, sitting down in the relegation zone.

While on paper at least, Sporting looked to be a walk over, football matches don't always follow mathematical logic in that respect and so Barcelona were fully prepared for whatever their visitors could throw at them.

All About The World Cup Soccer Tournament

Soccer is one of the largest, most watched sports in the world. It is a sport that has no boundaries, cultural or international, and as such, the World Cup is the largest sporting event in the world. It only happens once every four years, and that only helps boost it's popularity. To grasp how large it is, in 2006, FIFA estimates over seven hundred million people watched the final match of this tournament. To put it into perspective, that's twice the population of the USA.

The World Cup is one of the few sporting events that is played globally. As so many teams are from so many different countries, this makes the location of the event very important. FIFA tries to alternate the hosts between countries in Europe and the Americas. Historically, it has been held in many participating countries, from Brazil, to Italy, to the United States, to Germany, as well as many other countries. It has been scheduled in Brazil in 2014, in Russia in 2018, and in Qatar in 2022.