To finish the warm-up, Barcelona’s forwards have a ritual. They do the last sprint and go to the front of the area, where they make a shot on goal that confirms to their superstitious self that they will have a great game. Robert Lewandowski’s first shot at Mestalla hit the crossbar. The second was stopped by Kochen, the third goalkeeper, who held off the battery of shots. The next three attempts did not go between the posts. Only in the sixth did the Pole score, who hit the net again in the seventh. This is when he ended the session. Here, the new Barça player could sense that he would not have an easy game in Valencia.
Xavi’s team doesn’t even take shots in the warm-up. His Barcelona is being bled to death in the areas, where the matches are hopelessly slipping away. Part of his chances of being able to defend the League title he won last season have evaporated due to having wasted his best stretches of the match, not having been surgical when he had the opponent in hand and due to a lack of instinct , while unable to stop the bleeding of goals against.
There is no worse sin for a club aiming for greatness again than to forgive too much and concede too much. The perfect storm. Without forcefulness and effectiveness there can be no control. Barça has developed a complex of teams that are left in no man’s land soon, with nothing to fight for. And that, as Xavi is quick to remind, still keeps intact the objectives in the four titles that are in dispute. But in head-to-head matches in the Champions League, it’s best to be consistent and devastating, dominate them with an iron fist and crush them.
Opponents take advantage of this naive temperament, either because they give them an advantage at the beginning or because they keep them alive until the end. In the entire season, in only six games did they go into the break ahead on the scoreboard and it has been three months without winning a game by more than a goal difference. This means only one thing: suffering everywhere.
What happened in Mestalla is not new. For artificial intelligence, Barcelona should have scored three goals on Saturday. But Barcelona is the team in the five major European leagues that misses the most clear-cut chances, with 44, according to data from Opta.
The statistics say that Barça almost needs ten shots to score a goal (11.27% effectiveness), only Naples is worse. With 31 goals in the League, it is the worst scoring start in twenty years. To find a worse one, you have to go back to Rijkaard’s first season, with 23 goals.
He has scored 12 goals in the Champions League, five on his debut.
In total there are 43 goals in 23 matches. Not even on his landing, Xavi had seen a similar difficulty to shape the chances. In the first 23 times he sat on the bench, 44 were scored. It was the era of Luuk de Jong, Memphis, Demir, Jutglà and Abde, in addition to Ansu Fati.
Obviously, Barcelona lacked a lot of talent up top, which was solved through signings and transfers. Ferran Torres, Aubameyang and Adama arrived in January 2022. Six months later, Lewandowski and Raphinha were signed. And in the summer of 2023, João Félix joined, on loan. In total, when Vitor Roque signs up, the club will have paid 200 million between fixed and variable costs to strengthen the attack.
And the improvement, despite the portfolio, remains insufficient. Raphinha has not scored since September in Mallorca. Lewandovski does not see the visitors’ goal from the penalty spot in Pamplona, ??on September 3. João Félix went twelve games dry and Mestalla’s is his first goal away from Montjuïc, while Ferran Torres is unreliable. Last League was that of Lewandowski and Ter Stegen. At the moment, neither one nor the other, as the German goalkeeper is injured. His substitute, Iñaki Peña, was only decisive against Atlético. Barça concedes more than one goal per match (25 in 23) in a defense in which injuries weigh heavily – the four central players have been out of action (Iñigo Martínez is now there) – and colossal errors, in which Koundé has come out in several photos The combination is that in seventeen games the Blaugrana have conceded one less goal (19) than in the whole of the last League (20 in 38). An indentation Or worse, two. That’s not possible.
