Barcelona vs. Real Madrid Prediction on January 3, 2024

Match info

As the new year awakes, the men’s basketball 2023–24 EuroLeague starts the second half of the regular season. And is there a better way to do so than with the Spanish “El Clásico“? FC Barcelona Bàsquet will host Real Madrid Baloncesto on Wednesday, January 3, at 9 p.m. local time at Palau Blaugrana. If you glance at the odds set by the best mobile bookmakers, the visitors are favorites, which is no wonder given their dream first half of the season.

Meeting statistics

Barcelona and Real Madrid will face each other at the onset of the new year. It’s a priori an unequal duel. The home team comes with a dynamic mix of results and games. Recently its sports director has confessed that there are problems in the locker room. Roger Grimau doesn’t have the key to the solution and, for us, he lacks experience. There’s no defense, by which “Barça” has always been renowned, while offensively, he depends too much on Nicolás Laprovittola. Barcelona is a new team in a very bad moment of play and results (three defeats in the last four matches, six in the last eight), with the squad destabilized.

Barcelona experienced two painful defeats by the same result (91-71) in just 48 hours. If the image was bad against Unicaja, the visit to Monaco made them hit rock bottom. Grimau’s side was overwhelmed by a rocky team that had +30 (89-59) in the last quarter in which its absolute disintegration of the Catalan giants was confirmed.

Our sympathy tends to go toward Real, which is having a great season, only losing to Fenerbahçe (after overtime) in the EuroLeague thus far. In addition to a defeat from Unicaja in Liga ACB, “Los Blancos” suffered only two setbacks in 33 seasonal games overall. In this season’s Super Cup and home league clashes, Real was far superior in mutual encounters to Barcelona. And in the EuroLeague, it was a pretty below-the-standard duel party decided in the final moments: all in all, three head-to-heads in 2023–24 and three victories for Madridistas. Real is the best competitive squad in Europe right now. Most of their players spent a lot of time playing together.

The dominance of the team from the Spanish capital can be best portrayed by their last EuroLeague match. Real took home the victory from bottom club ASVEL (76-77) with the final horn after Sergio Llull missed a free throw so that the French team’s possession ran out, even though they suffered from the absence of Mario Hezonja, Rudy Fernández, Gabriel Deck, and Guerschon Yabusele.

Match analytics

There’s absolutely no way that Real can lose to their arch-rivals in the next match. And, even though, the odds for the moneyline win of Real are quite worthy of playing with, we propose something else: Away Total Points Over 83.5 with odds of 1.95 at Bethard.

Results of the forecast

Successful forecast. Barcelona vs. Real Madrid 83:78