Jude Bellingham and Gavi were involved in a feisty battle in Real Madrid’s 2-1 win over Barcelona. In the first El Clasico of the 2023/24 season, a lot of the focus was on Bellingham. The midfield battle between the two promising youngsters was in focus, but it included a rather weird moment.
But for the majority of the match, his threat was completely neutralized by Gavi. The Barcelona midfielder played in a much deeper role than usual. He stuck very close to Bellingham, not giving him much freedom to operate at all.
The two even got into a few heated interactions during the game. Bellingham was infuriated with how dirty Gavi played at times and started kicking him. He even got into the Spaniard’s face and told him to stop kicking him. The Barca star was unfazed by this and used unique methods to rattle him.
One of those included spanking the Englishman’s buttocks for some reason. The cameras were even able to capture this entire incident, where the two were holding onto each other from the sides before the Spaniard spanked him on the backside.
For some, this was Gavi trying to tell Bellingham ‘who is boss’ by spanking him. Others even started to question the Barcelona midfielder’s sexual choices with LGBTQ rainbow flags.
However, this weird incident might prove that footballers aren’t really that different from K-pop artists in some of their actions. That is because, among some of the K-pop fraternity, spanking has become a pretty common thing.
Indeed, a lot of K-pop artists have been very open in spanking their mates in shows or interviews. There is still no real logical reason about why this has become a trend in K-pop. However, the K-pop fans seem to absolutely love it and have only encouraged their favourite artists to keep indulging in it.
During one interview, the members of the K-pop boy group NCT even willing to take part in a spanking contest. The likes of Shotaro, Haechan, Renjun, Jaemin and Yangyang were all part of this. Basically, the contest seemed to be a case of the bandmates having a lot of fun with each other. The one to deliver the hardest and most memorable spank would win it.
Spanking in K-pop is also quite frequent and visible in the artists’ music videos. Quite often an artist will be spanking someone in their video and almost try to create a ‘trend’ around this. Now, spanking is historically used as punishment – but the K-pop ones seem to indicate that its fine to do it with your friend.
With that being said, it’s fair to assume that there was nothing friendly about Gavi’s spank to Bellingham. He might’ve done so to use it as mind game and further rattle the Real Madrid star into losing his cool and getting sent off. Unfortunately for him, the Englishman only got motivated by his dirty tactics in trying to hold him back.
Bellingham produced an incredible long-range effort to bring things level in El Clasico. After that, he popped up out of nowhere to score the second and leave Gavi crying at full-time. The Barca star might’ve won the battle of spanking but ended up losing the actual war on the pitch.