Barcelona Has Put It All Together

In the long and storied history of Barcelona, this past week hardly rates as one of its best. This is a club that has won 27 La Liga trophies, five Champions Leagues, a sextuple, you name it. Two wins in four days is great, and doubly so when considering the opposition, but it's still only October, and there are no ticker-tape parades under the Arc de Triomf in October. Nevertheless, Barcelona really needed this exact week, with these exact results, in its efforts to shake off the doldrums that have haunted it in its post–Lionel Messi haze, and at last inaugurate a new era worthy of the best of the old ones.

The week from heaven started in the Champions League on Oct. 23. Barcelona had started this newly formatted tournament with a wet fart, losing 2-1 to Monaco in the opener after Eric García got himself sent off in the 10th minute. Though a 5-0 drubbing of Swiss side Young Boys followed, the level of the opposition meant the match was more or less useless in determining what the ceiling of first-year manager Hansi Flick's new-look, refreshed, but still unproven side was going to be. The first serious test came last Wednesday at the hands of Bayern Munich, and it's safe to say Barcelona aced it.

Raphinha, team captain and its most resurgent player this season, scored within a minute of the opening whistle, and though Harry Kane got one back for the Germans in the 18th minute, this was not meant to be a close match. That's because that same Raphinha uncorked a hat trick, scoring just before half-time on a gorgeous curler before slotting home a far post low shot to well and truly seal the match in the 56th minute. It's now been 10 years since Barça last won the Champions League, and many of those campaigns have ended in humiliation, some of those humiliations handed out by Bayern itself. Even if only in league play, besting the mighty Bayern by a score of 4-1 was the most encouraging European performance the Catalan club had put together in ages.

As encouraging as the win was, there is an argument to be made that Barcelona should have beat Bayern. Though it currently sits atop the Bundesliga, Bayern is still trying to find its footing after a couple underwhelming seasons, and was coming off an unexpected loss to Aston Villa in its previous Champions League match. There was no similar qualifier entering Saturday's match, the 258th Clásico in history, and one at Real Madrid's Bernabeu fortress to boot. Though Barcelona was in first place in La Liga, Madrid entered the match undefeated domestically, fresh off a typically electric comeback against Dortmund in a rematch of last year's final; the reigning champs were down 2-0 as late as the hour mark, but stormed back with five goals in the final 30 minutes. Los Blancos also had the recent advantage in this match-up, winning the last two Clásicos and seven of the last nine.

Through the first half of Saturday's match, Madrid looked the more dangerous side, striking back against Barcelona's patented possession tactic to run at the stretched back-line on the counter. However, in a continuation of one of the wilder statistical trends of this season, Barcelona kept deploying its high line and offside trap, catching Madrid's attackers running too early a whopping eight times in the first half. Kylian Mbappé somehow got himself caught offside six times in the opening 45, nullifying a couple of goals when he probably has enough pace to beat anyone on Barcelona without needing to run early.

It got quite comical at one point, but this is just what Barcelona has done this season: Including Saturday's match, the club has drawn 77 offside calls in its favor this season, at a rate of seven per match. Those numbers are good enough for first in Europe, and they dwarf second-place Brighton, which has drawn 35 offside calls in nine matches (3.88 per). This is a legitimate strength for Barcelona, one that would show on tape, and yet Madrid seemed utterly befuddled by it. This would come back to haunt the hosts in the second half, once Barcelona got its shit together going the other way.

There's no way to sugarcoat this: Barcelona beat the ever-loving crap out of Real Madrid in the second half. The four goals on the scoreboard are a nice place to start, and there were some beauties in there. Robert Lewandowski's two-minute brace wasn't spectacular on its own, save for the speed at which the goals came, but the assists for both were something to behold. For the first, Marc Casadó spotted Lewandowski running perfectly in parallel to the Madrid backline—no offside here—and hit a line-splitting pass that left Europe's leading scorer with an easy one-on-one:

The second assist is only notable for who hit the cross for Lewandowski's towering header; Alejandro Balde is great at a lot of things, but crossing isn't one of them, and yet the 21-year-old put the ball right on his striker's noggin, and Lewandowski once again made no mistake with the opportunity:

Those goals were merely an appetizer for the exclamation point: In the 77th minute, who else but Lamine Yamal found himself on the receiving end of a counter-attack through ball from Raphinha on the right side of the penalty box. The 17-year-old, recently Barcelona's brightest light and at times during the dying days of Xavi's tenure as manager the only light, took one touch to open up space past Ferland Mendy, and roofed a laser beam to seal the rout:

Raphinha would continue his torrid form seven minutes later to make it 4-0, a scoreline that manages to flatter Real Madrid while also making anyone who watched the game question how it couldn't score a single time. Barcelona isn't a stout defensive side, but the Blaugrana thrives off choking the life out of opponents with the aforementioned offsides, and the passes, and the fact that Lewandowski seemingly can't miss this season. In beating two of the biggest clubs in the world in a four-day span, Barcelona announced that it's back, but it didn't need to. Under Flick, there's an air of respectability, even after a summer of deep embarrassment, and that's enough to make Barcelona a fun watch once again.

Now, the club sits atop La Liga by six points, and it should be favored to win its remaining five Champions League matches in this league stage. (That's not to say its matches are easy; traveling to Dortmund is always dangerous, and Atalanta on the final day pits Barcelona against the reigning Europa League champions.) If there was a best-case scenario for how Flick's first two-and-a-half months in charge could have gone, it might have looked something like this, and it definitely would have included "beat Bayern and Real by an 8-1 aggregate score."

Add in the fact that Lewandowski is playing like the Lewandowski of old, and how well the so-called kids have played when plugged into positions up and down the field, and Barcelona is in as good a spot as any team in Europe relative to its expectations. Now is when it gets harder, though; no one will underestimate Barcelona again this season, not when it has shown it can knock any team off in dominant fashion. As Bayern Munich and Real Madrid found out this week, Barcelona's execution has finally caught up to the talent on its roster.