Of all of the top teams in Europe, Barcelona under manager Hansi Flick is the most addicted to the offside trap. The high-risk, high-reward defense has been Flick's trademark as a manager, and Barcelona has, by both design and necessity, adopted it with striking intensity. Flick's mantra is simple: Play a high line, try to catch opponents offside, and if and when it fails, just out-score them on the other end. This, I'd say, broadly worked last season. Barcelona won La Liga while scoring 102 goals and giving up just 39, and advanced to the Champions League semifinals before the risk caught up with the reward in its 7-6 aggregate loss to Inter Milan.
The offside trap is one of the simplest defensive game plans in soccer to describe, and one of the hardest to execute effectively. Its core principles are straightforward: A defensive backline moves up and down the field (mostly up; the offside trap works in unison with that defensive high line) as a unit, baiting opponents into hitting through balls into open space before catching them offside with synchronized stepping up. The offside trap, then, boils defending down to one moment of collective decision and execution, rather than many individual showdowns across the field. If the defense moves together at the right time, the trap can work extremely well. But any lagging from even a single defender will give up reams of easy counterattacks.
After so much success last season, Barcelona's offside trap this year has been faltering at an alarming pace. Opponents are getting behind the trap and asking isolated defenders to make incredible goal-saving plays, which the disadvantaged defenders are for the most part failing to do. Over the club's last nine games, Barcelona has kept zero clean sheets, its worst defensive run since 2013, and that stretch has now featured three losses and a draw after a near-perfect start to the campaign.
Though Barcelona's 4-1 loss to Sevilla in La Liga back on Oct. 5 was the worst performance in this stretch of defensive incompetence, Wednesday's 3-3 draw away at Club Brugge best demonstrated the issues with Flick's maniacally high line this season. All three of Brugge's goals came from counterattacks that perfectly exploited the offside trap and all of the space behind it, and all three goals came from Carlos Forbs in one way or another.
I wouldn't say the three goals were carbon copies of each other, but they all followed the same pattern. In the sixth minute, Forbs made a perfectly timed run to beat the trap, received a ball out wide to the right, then cut back for Nicolò Tresoldi to finish what was essentially a tap in:
In the 17th minute, Brugge got the ball back in its own box, and with just two passes Forbs was released against just one Barcelona defender. A give-and-go later, and he had wide open space to finish with a left-footed curler:
In the 63rd minute, Forbs once again made a trap-busting run down the right side, and finished with a nifty left-footed chip:
Brugge might have been out-possessed and out-shot (24 to 76 percent and 10 to 23, respectively), but that was always going to be the case, even at home, thanks to the talent gap between the teams. The offside trap is a great equalizer, for better and for worse; there's certainly skill involved in timing a run perfectly against a well-coordinated defense and in hitting the correct ball to take advantage of those runs, but speed, an attribute that can be readily found anywhere, can kill it dead. Against great teams, the offside trap can confound and lower the quality of play to a manageable level, but against an underdog like Brugge, Barcelona's trap actually elevates the opportunities afforded a team that likely would struggle to break down a more conventional defense. Forbs isn't a scrub, by any means; the 21-year-old is a product of the Manchester City academy, and has played for Ajax and in the Premier League with Wolverhampton. He's also really freaking fast, as he demonstrated on Wednesday. Giving anything less than full concentration any time Brugge had the ball—or, really, any time Barça lost the ball—allowed Forbs to victimize poor Wojciech Szczesny in one-on-ones.
Where did Barcelona go wrong on Wednesday? It's possible to blame individual mistakes for each of the goals. On the first, Jules Koundé didn't move up with the rest of his backline, keeping Forbs offside. On the second, Alejandro Balde was caught in no man's land as Forbs ran behind him. On the third, Balde was again caught flat-footed as Forbs ran behind him with a diagonal run towards the center.
Really, though, the bad defending all season long shows that the problem is systemic, with a number of factors leading Barcelona to such dismal defensive depths. One of the biggest ones came in the offseason departure of Iñigo Martínez to Saudi Arabia. (Blame Barcelona's shambolic finances for both his departure and the lack of a replacement coming in during the summer transfer window.) Martínez was Barcelona's best center back last year, a steady figure who dominated his individual duels and helped organize the offside trap to (almost) perfection. Ronald Araújo, once considered a budding superstar, has been merely serviceable at best for a couple years now, and the partnership with Eric García, as Flick used on Wednesday, is prone to mistakes and slow recoveries.
But blaming personnel risks missing the forest for the trees. Barcelona is catching even more players offside than last year, in terms of pace, and broadly the offside trap has worked in the ways it is supposed to work. It's a bit further up the field that the problems really originate. For an offside trap to work, it can't be tested all game long; no set of defenders can be that perfect for 90 minutes. Barcelona's answer to that issue is to press high up the field after losing the ball, so as to rush or entirely prevent the line-breaking through balls that would threaten to slip the back line's trap. On that end, Barça's high pressing has been much worse this season, thanks to injuries to players key to making that high press work—Raphinha, Gavi, and Pedri have all missed multiple games with a variety of maladies—and a very simple solution: Just play wide.
Dating back to the days of Dani Alves essentially playing on the right wing, Barcelona has been at the forefront of the attacking fullbacks movement in soccer, and it continues to utilize those two players far up the field. While this helps power Barcelona's incredible offense, it also leaves gaps out wide, as Balde and Koundé move both up and inside. Look again at Brugge's second goal, Forbs's first: Koundé is almost at the Brugge penalty box when the hosts recovered the ball, completely out of the ensuing defensive action that left Balde completely on his own.
Of course, this is a trade-off Flick is generally happy to live with, thanks to how unstoppable even a weakened Barcelona attack can be. On Wednesday, with Brugge feasting on counters, Barcelona's attack was still sharp, and came close to scoring enough to win the shootout. Ferran Torres's opening goal was also a line-beating run with a nice finish, and Lamine Yamal, a bum hip hobbling him below his usual world-beating heights recently, had his best performance of the season, scoring a ridiculous solo goal in the 60th minute and then forcing an own goal to draw things back up at three in the 77th. Still, though, I think it's safe to say Barcelona was lucky to not lose to Brugge.
Is there a solution for this dip in defensive quality? The obvious fix would be to either abandon the high line and offside trap, or at least play it more conservatively, but Flick is an aggressive, stubborn manager, so I don't see that happening. More likely, the team will be hoping that a better bill of health can shore things up. Any tactic is only as good as the players executing it, and Barça has been missing several of the players who made these same tactics work so well before. With Raphinha (a pressing demon) and Pedri back in the lineup, and with Lamine getting back to maximum capacity, Barça's high press should be much more effective than it is right now. (And once goalkeeper Joan García, a huge summer addition, is under the sticks again, the team should be much better at stopping the shots that do sneak through.) Whether that will be enough to return Barcelona to its place as one of the big favorites in every competition, or if the damage has already been done and opponents have learned to crack the code, is something we'll only know if and when we see it. Until then, Barça will have to nurse its wounds while waiting to free itself from the trap of its own devising.
