Barcelona’s biggest positives and negatives from this season so far

Today marks the 100th day since Koeman took charge of FCBarcelona and even though it has only been just 100 days, a lot has happened and we have already seen enough from our team to draw the first set of observations. A lot of positive signs but also a few negative signs can be seen from Koeman’s work so far and even though there has been a lot of talk from the fans that they aren’t happy with Ronald – we have won all 4 of our Champions League games so far. Even though our position in La Liga leaves a lot to be desired, we are still 2 games in hand and there are over 30 more league games to be played and over 90 points to be earned.

At the start of the season back in October, I wrote a post regarding what we can expect from Barca this season and what the very early signs have shown (post can be accessed here). After over 2 months, I will be going through the biggest claims I made, looking at how the players have responded with what we have seen so far from our team and seeing what still needs to be improved in the team to be fully satisfied.

Positive Signs

Ability to play good, fast, attacking football 

We will start with the positive signs, quite a number of them, and first of them being our ability to play genuinely entertaining and good attacking football. Barca has shown this season that they are able to play some amazing football. The game against Juventus, our league games against Villareal and Celta have been masterclasses when it comes to attacking football and made us show our threat and true abilities. Players like Ousmane and Ansu seem to be able to thrive under Koeman due to his tactics and the way he sets up the team.

Squad rotation and willingness to experiment with the squad

So far this season, Barca has fielded 25 different players. Considering our habit to not change our team much in the previous seasons that’s a big improvement. Not only does it show that Koeman is more open to resting the most Important players to not risk injuries (just like he did for the Kiev game), this also shows that Koeman is open to trying different players and give everyone a chance. Players who were told to be written off by Koeman at the start of the season are playing quite well and after the most recent game we played in the UCL, it seems that players like Alena, Puig and Matheus will get more game time as they looked very good.

Lot of game time for young players

Arguably the best positive from this season so far. Koeman has been know to be a strong admirer of Barca’s academy, and he has shown us that he believes in it perhaps more than any of our previous 2 coaches. Ofcourse, injuries have played a big part in the fact that a number of La Masia graduates are getting first team game time, but personally what I find the most mind-blowing is their ability to slot into the team like a hand in a glove. Im not even going to mention Ansu, because when he plays he looks like he has been a starter at Barca for at least 2 seasons already but against Dynamo Kiev, Oscar Mingueza looked like a natural and consistent first team player, Carles Alena at times made me feel like I’m watching Xavi play and Sergino Dest’s way of playing makes me feel like we finally found Dani Alves’ heir. Riqui Puig has brought a lot of dynamism and energy to our midfield and Matheus played very solidly. Over the course of this season, Pedri has shown his talent with some of his performances and if Francisco Trincao will get more play time and learn to keep his composure and concentration, we will have an amazing winger in our team.

Negative observations

Injuries

Now, although many factors can affect the players’ health and consequently cause injuries, this season injuries have unfortunately been a common sight in almost every single major football team in Europe and this is mainly due to FIFA’s and UEFA’s treatment of players and the schedule that has been created. Ultimately, money is main driving force in the world we live in and considering the economical state many institutions and football team find them selves in (including Barcelona), as well as the fact that the previous UCL campaign finished in August, its no surprise that UEFA has made the schedule of European football competitions so tight. UCL and UEL games are played every week (!), which means football teams have 3 days to travel around Europe, train and prepare for their next matches, domestic or International ones. In short terms – an absolute joke.

Football players aren’t machines and the human body cannot cope with this type of treatment, both from a purely physical as well as mental aspect. Players get fatigued, drained from energy as well as motivation and play at a very poor level. Making it even worse, the sort of cycle that players go through at the moment makes their bodies extremely susceptible to injuries. When players play within 72-hour periods, their muscles are much more tense, muscle contractions and joints perform at a much lower level and injuries are much more likely.

So far, this season we have lost Ansu Fati, Gerard Pique, Jordi Alba, Samuel Umtiti, Ronald Araujo, Sergi Roberto, Sergio Busquets and Coutinho all due to injury. Some of the before mentioned have already returned to training but it’s still an awful amount of first team players. Ter Stegen has only recently came back from injury and a number of players either missed training sessions or started games on the bench purely due to minimising injury risks or making sure players are physically ok (players such as Ousmane or Messi). What’s worse is that For a few players, the injuries they are suffering from are long term ones and make their presence in this season either unlikely or under serious doubt. With Ansu being only 18, let’s hope his injury isn’t going to put further drawbacks on his career in the future.

Lack of concentration/motivation and energy for games in La Liga

Sometimes when you watch a football team for a long time, you can tell when the players are playing with grit and motivation and you can also tell when they’re out of energy and not motivated. When you look at some of Barca’s first half displays against for example Atletico last week or Alaves and the whole game against Getafe, you see that the players come out for La Liga games either tired due to UCL action in midweek or not motivated to play at a high level in the league. Saying this, we have seen Barca play very impressive football in the league, for example against Villareal or Celta. Both of these games came at the start of the season when the players were full of energy, suggesting that motivation may not be the main issue.

It is also important to mention that when players see they are having poor refereeing decisions or VAR/lack of VAR interventions directly affect their games, they lose motivation to play at a high level as they see that they are not only battling the opposition team but are also up against the referee. This has been the case in many league games this season – most notably Real Madrid but also Sevilla and Getafe. However, it must be said, through lapses of concentration we really aren’t helping our luck with refereeing calls. The ‘foul’ Lenglet performed on Ramos during the El Clasico was unnecessary to say the least and the penalty controversy could have been easily avoided. Situations like these tend to have a huge effect on our performances and matches. We need to learn to avoid these silly lapses of concentration. When we do, we will improve significantly.

Lack of consistency 

When talking about the positive signs, I first talked about how we have shown the ability to play fast, attacking football this season. Notice how I say ability instead of habit. We show these faces way too little recently and even though we tend to start games worse than we end them, games like the one against Juventus need to be replicated much more often in order to have a good shot at all 3 competitions we hope to battle for.

The reason why I’m ending on the lack of consistency aspect is because I think that that’s the best way of summarising Barca this season so far. We have seen some outstanding matches from our team but also some very poor matches. We seem to be weaving our season through a lot of highs and lows. Until we stabilise our level to more or less know where we are ability wise, only then will we be able to set realistic goals for our team, however, if we manage to sort out the injury problems and improve our concentration in matches against theoretically weaker opponents, the long road could have a very happy ending.

Jerzy Olszewski