Aakash and I went to El Clasico on April 3rd, 2016 in Barcelona, and it was an amazing experience (would have been more amazing if Barcelona had actually won, but I guess you can’t win ‘em all). Getting tickets was a super painful experience, and we didn’t find a ton of resources on the Internet about it, so I wanted to share a couple tips that would have helped us get tickets back then.

1) Tickets go on sale a few months before the match, so the first thing you should do is to keep an eye out on either the Barcelona or Real Madrid website (depending on where the match will be held).

2) If you don’t get tickets when they first go on sale - we didn’t - more tickets are released the day before the match. These are tickets belonging to members of the club, who, for whatever reason, didn’t want them (members are able to purchase these tickets a day earlier (i.e. two days before the match), so the best thing to do is to find a member who’s willing to buy tickets for you ;)). This option is extremely competitive, so you’ll have to be very lucky to get tickets. We somehow managed to get tickets this way, but there were more than 100,000 people behind us in line, so our odds weren’t that good.

3) Since options 1 and 2 depend a lot on chance, another option is buying tickets on Viagogo. Usually, club members (socis) have a season pass for certain seats, and they might put their tickets up on Viagogo a couple months before the match. If you choose to do this, I highly recommend buying tickets early. We were hopeful that prices would drop as we got closer to the day of the match, but they actually went up. Currently, the tickets for the Dec 23rd 2017 match are selling for ~$500, and we’re a month out. Another thing to note that this is technically not allowed, and soci members could get in trouble for selling you their ticket (link). This is mostly just an issue if you’re buying tickets from a Madrid supporter and you’re a Barca fan, or vice versa.

4) It is possible to try and buy a ticket from a scalper outside the stadium, but there is obviously some risk involved in that route. We didn’t notice any scalpers when we went to the match (to be fair, we weren’t exactly looking out for them), but I’ve read that it’s possible to find tickets this way.

5) Lastly, I would suggest keeping an eye out on various forums on the internet. It sounds silly, but there are often people looking to sell their tickets at the last second on Reddit (link).