At Barcelona, hell is other players. There is no time when the abject state of the club is more apparent than during the transfer window, when Barça, with the help of its media parrots, sells to its perpetually gullible supporters fantasies of lavish spending sprees to bring in the biggest of names. The fantasies are often unrealistic at best and dangerous at worst in light of the club's teetering finances, which still haven't recovered from the time when Barcelona actually did have cash to splash, and did so so extravagantly and fruitlessly that the club damn near drowned. In its efforts to make good on the self-generated hype, the club, again with the help of the parrots, attempts to alienate much of its existing squad, who upon joining were themselves sold a dream of being a key cog in the resurrection of a great club, only to be callously shunted off into the unwanted list and pressured into leaving town.
The players Barça winds up signing, after scaring up funds by finding new Peters to rob to keep the Pauls away, are typically underwhelming and ill-suited to address the squad's shortcomings, so much so that even on the day of their unveiling you know you're only a window or two away from them too being lumped atop the discard pile. It's only when the transfer window shuts, the fantasies are dispelled, the disappointment becomes solid and inert, and the roster is more or less set, that Barça fans are spared direct confrontation with all that is ugly with the club as a whole and can begin to find whatever enjoyment there is in the team itself.
Thankfully, at the close of yet another farcical transfer window, there is a whole hell of a lot to enjoy with this particular Barcelona team. In a stroke of good fortune, club president Joan Laporta did not re-reverse his decision to get rid of Xavi, last season's manager, and so this talented but criminally underutilized squad is now under the stewardship of Hansi Flick. Xavi's managerial tenure was defined by his great relationship with the players, his impressive ability to steep their competitive juices and cultivate their fighting spirit, his near total inability to implement any of the ideals of play he prattled on about in press conferences, and his inflexible tactics that made just about every player look worse than they actually are, even when it was working. Just four games into the Flick era, it is already evident how much better off the entire team is.
Alfredo Di Stéfano once said that a good manager can contribute up to 10 percent to a team's success, while a bad manager can hurt his team by up to 40 percent. One can quibble with the percentages, but the sentiment is right: bad managers do more harm than good managers do good. For much—though, it should be said, not all—of Xavi's tenure, it was clear that he was one of those impediments to his team's success. Flick, in contrast, already looks like a positive influence.
So much of what Xavi talked about but didn't know how to realize is actually true of Flick's Barça: the team has a strong, effective high press, a voracious attack facilitated by a vertical style of play, and the ability to dominate games with possession, keeping the ball as both an offensive and defensive tactic. On top of that, Flick's team has rediscovered the benefits of true midfield play. (The most baffling part of Xavi's management was how little prominence he gave the midfielders, asking them essentially to spend all game shooting the gaps between the opposing center and full backs, a thankless task that stood in utter contradiction to everything he represented as a player.) The best proof of how good a manager Flick is comes from his aptitude at recognizing his players' strengths, figuring out how to maximize them, and giving them positions and roles that once again have the players playing some of the best soccer of their lives.
You'd be hard pressed to find a better example of all of this—the club's heedless spending, its cruel disregard of the players' feelings when trying to push them out, Xavi's inexpert management, and Flick's improvements—than in the figure of Raphinha. Two years ago Raphinha came to Barcelona as one of the crown jewels of the club's sketchy but exciting lever-pulling economic strategy. The Brazilian had emerged at Leeds United as one of the more promising right wingers in the world, a fount of flashy touches and mazy runs and left-footed cannon shots. The €60 million cost was high, and his skill set didn't exactly match those of the attacking fulcrums the club has grown accustomed to—unlike Messi, Neymar, and Ronaldinho, Raphinha's game has always been based on athleticism and brute force, not finesse and ingenuity—but he was still a gifted player who fit what at first looked like a position of need (this became less true when the club re-signed Ousmane Dembélé, the man it had seemed like Raphinha was brought in to replace). As far as recent big-money signings went, the Raphinha one seemed sound enough.
Since joining, Raphinha has been mostly disappointing. Part of this is due to expectations and usage. Despite the evident differences in their games, fans still believed Raphinha, the club's expensive new attacking star, should play like those aforementioned attacking stars. Not only that, it seemed as if Xavi too expected from Raphinha a style of play that was beyond his ken. Instead of getting him on the move and in open space, where he'd thrived at Leeds and Rennes before that, Raphinha collected passes into his feet way out near the touchline, tasked with beating opponents from a standstill and inventing danger thereafter, the way Messi and Neymar and Ronaldinho used to do. When Raphinha proved hopeless in those situations, he was either benched or played out on the left, where he was handed all the same tasks but from even more difficult angles.
Eventually, even Xavi was savvy enough to realize where the winger's true talents lay—attacking space with runs behind the defense, tireless running and pressing—and so he started asking Raphinha for a more limited game of channel running and front-foot defending, sometimes from one of Xavi's inglorious midfield positions. The Brazilian complied, and has quietly produced impressive goal and assist numbers throughout his time in Spain. But mere competence and versatility is not what Barcelona and the fans were looking for from their €60-million player, especially not when a teenaged Lamine Yamal showed up doing exactly the things erroneously expected of Raphinha. Because of this, Raphinha has never shaken the reputation as being something close to a bust.
Just one year after investing all that money in him, Barcelona was already prepared to be rid of him. During every transfer window since he first signed, the club has resorted to its usual underhanded tactic of leaking to the media how open (read: desperate) the club is to selling him if a good bid (read: anything that would prevent them from taking a balance-book loss on the deal) came along. When no club around Europe would bite on this depressed asset, Barça would then leak how much interest there was in him from Saudi Arabia. The Saudi interest never seemed particularly real, nor did it succeed in either of the club's twin aims of stimulating interest from other clubs and getting Raphinha to start looking for an exit in light of how eager Barça was to invent suitors for him. Raphinha has repeatedly, strenuously denied any interest in leaving the club he dreamed of playing for back when he was a poor kid shunned by Brazil's big academies, clawing for a career through the country's cutthroat várzea tournaments. But it always felt like the club's lack of trust in him had taken its toll, as if he played every game looking not just to perform well but to prove that he belonged at a club that didn't seem to want him.
If Xavi's Raphinha was capable, effective, and limited, then Flick's Raphinha has been downright scintillating. Finally, we're starting to see him recapture the promise he showed during his electrifying couple years in England. In some respects, the differences between then and now aren't even all that stark. Raphinha has spent much of the present season playing as a space-attacking midfielder, not totally dissimilar from the position Xavi sometimes used him in. However, this midfield Raphinha is granted more freedom to move up and down the pitch in search of space, and, even more importantly, is placed inside a tactical scheme that amplifies the effect of his movements. Whether playing as a midfielder or a left- or right-sided forward, Raphinha has been the yin to striker Robert Lewandowski's yang, threatening the backs of the central defenders whenever Lewandowski drops deep. Those coordinated movements with Lewandowski, and the better delegated roles for the midfielders who indeed do play like midfielders, mean Raphinha's charges forward are more effective at creating space for himself and his teammates, and are more often rewarded with passes over the top to connect with his line-shattering runs. And in a more synchronized press, Raphinha's defensive abilities have proven even more potent than before. It's no coincidence that in Barça's trio of 2-1 wins to start the season, Raphinha's hybrid midfielder/forward role was one of the keys that allowed the team to hum.
But it took Raphinha returning to the forward line full time during last Saturday's match against Real Valladolid for the 27-year-old to show his truly best self. The match, a 7-0 Barcelona blowout, was one of the best and most entertaining outings from the club in years, and nobody had more to do with it than Raphinha.
Raphinha scored Barça's first goal of the game, took the corner kick from which Jules Koundé scored the third, scored the fourth and fifth goals himself, played the pass before the assist on the sixth, and assisted Ferran Torres on the seventh and final goal. Though nominally starting from the left wing—the spot where he'd previously performed worst as a Barcelona player—Raphinha's role as a free-roaming second striker allowed him to do all the things he's great at en route to his best-ever match in Blaugrana: six shots, three chances created, one assist, and his first career hat trick.
Along with being the best he's ever looked at Barça, it was also the happiest I've ever seen him there. As much pleasure as I took from watching the latest and greatest match of a season that's already shaping up to be my favorite one in god knows how long, I was especially thrilled to see Raphinha's big smiles after each of his goals, and the pure joy of his teammates when they ran over to celebrate with him. For once, it's no longer a question of whether Raphinha belongs—the proof is right there, on the scoreboard and on his and his teammates' faces, for all to see.
