For a team that scores goals by the bucketful, it's interesting that Barcelona's game is designed first and foremost around the pass. It's not that the squad doesn't have finishers: Old Man Robert Lewandowski remains a (silver) fox in the box; Ferran Torres, Fermín López, and Dani Olmo all, as they say, have goals in them; and, by some sort of arcane ethno-numerological magic, Barça's current Brazilian No. 11, Raphinha, has this year transformed into Barça's former Brazilian No. 11, Rivaldo. But the three players who form Barça's foundation in this unexpectedly amazing season are Pau Cubarsí, Lamine Yamal, and Pedri. And each of them individually, and therefore the team collectively, is defined by their genius for passing.
Lamine's passing is naturally the showiest. Of all the skills that make up the teenager's world-class present and his limitless future potential, it's his gift for the final ball that stands out as the most differential today. At just 17 years old he already has a trademark move, the trivela pass, one of the most difficult and visually arresting techniques in the game. Cubarsí's passing is maybe the most readily identifiable. There are passes he hits—be they bombs over the top of the opposition back line, jackknifed balls that cut through tiny crevices to find teammates between enemy lines, or disguised ones that his body shapes toward one direction until at the last second he swivels his action-figure hips and sends them off at a completely different angle—that look more like what a Pirlo-style midfielder might try than a central defender. There's genuinely no other center back right now who's executing complicated passes like Cubarsí, who is himself only 18 years old. But while those two certainly play a major role in forming the team's style, the true orchestrator of all the pretty little passes that bypass pressure, unbuckle defenses, and tee up Lewandowski and Raphinha and the rest for the goals that have made Barça one of the two standout teams in Europe this season, is Pedri.
A full four years after his own teenaged breakout, the 22-year-old Pedri is finally having the consecrating season everyone foresaw for him—though it doesn't look quite like what you would have expected back then. That first, reedy Pedri made his greatest impact as Lionel Messi's sidekick. The Canary Islander's sensitivity for combination play, wall passes, and fluid, intertwining movement was like the ambrosia Messi needed to power his Olympian efforts. Not since probably Andrés Iniesta had Messi found a midfielder so naturally attuned to the Argentine's needs. The pair's languid yet devastating collaborations made for the last great partnership of Barcelona's Messi era, and marked Pedri as a cornerstone of a potential future Barça that could aspire to do the previous era justice.
From there, the question about Pedri was always going to be how he transitioned from squire to full-on protagonist in his own right. The process of answering that question has been an interrupted one. Injuries have dogged Pedri's career in the four years since that debut campaign, when he played approximately one trillion matches between the 2020-21 club season, the 2021 Euros, and the 2021 Olympics, and unsurprisingly broke down. In the three seasons after that first one, Pedri was only healthy enough to play about half of the available minutes in any given year. The cycle was agonizing: Pedri would get hurt, rehab his way back to fitness, return to the pitch, quickly start to show that his immense talent had not diminished, then suffer another injury and have to start all over.
Finally, though, it appears that Pedri has turned the corner. Armed with a new, individualized approach to his physical preparation—about the specifics of which he remains tightlipped, probably out a totally understandable superstitiousness—Pedri, with his sturdier but still lithe frame, is enjoying his healthiest season since his first in the elite. What has emerged is a player not merely as good as you would've predicted had you charted a linear progression for him starting in 2020, but a player who is somehow far better than that.
By training, Pedri is your classic No. 10. In his early days at Las Palmas and Barcelona he made his name in advanced positions, starting either centrally or on either wing, bobbing into and out of the interstices of the opposition's lines, looking to get on the ball and with a touch or two combine with a teammate or clop past a defender or strike a pass into the spaces his efforts had helped open up. This was a game of relatively infrequent but high-impact interventions, and he was great at making those moments count.
The current Pedri still does all of that. He remains the most effective Barça midfielder when he plays ahead of the ball, especially the closer he gets to the crown of the penalty box, where he can use his deceptively plodding dribbling style to trot around his would-be assailants and pick passes that unravel even the most tightly knit defenses. He is a playmaker in the truest sense: not just the guy who plays the pass to the guy who shoots, but the one who directs the entire attack, who plays final passes but also the pass before the final pass and the pass that creates the opening through which the goal eventually appears several moments later. Few players in the world today can match or better Pedri's influence in the final third, and there's probably not a single true central midfielder who can do so.
If the above is all Pedri did, it would be enough to make him one of the game's best midfielders. But what's most remarkable about his growth this season is how his sphere of influence has expanded, to the point where it now envelops the entire pitch. Along with his customary role in the final third, Pedri has added all the controlling midfielder stuff with which deep-lying midfielders like Toni Kroos made their game. So much of what Pedri has done from above he now also does from below: demanding the ball, carrying it forward, searching for space, determining the direction and tempo of the move. Where one predicted future for the 2021 Pedri might have seen him simply improving at what he was already good at, writing increasingly powerful conclusions to Barça's possessions, the current Pedri does that while also coming up with the introduction, thesis, and supporting arguments. He has become the consummate allfielder. A sidekick no longer, Pedri is today Barcelona's best, most important, and most consistent player.
Maybe my favorite part about the new and improved Pedri is how much of the old Pedri is still there—specifically his unique elegance. As an attack-minded midfielder at this particular club, from the moment Pedri showed up in Barcelona he was christened the reincarnated Iniesta. The comparison isn't totally unfounded, I guess. They are two aesthetically pleasing No. 8s who play with a preternatural calm and command, two masters of the subtle whose utter domination of matches was in no way impugned by their names' infrequent appearance on the actual scoresheet. But in terms of what the two look like on the field, the two players are closer to opposites than twins.
Iniesta's game was an angel's. He didn't walk on the pitch so much as he floated just above it, gliding over the blades of grass with the ball inextricably tied to his foot the way only an ethereal being unencumbered by the physical forces of reality could. Pedri, by contrast, is much more earthy, ground-bound. He trots—and though he actually runs a ton and often does so quite quickly, the impression is that he's permanently moving at a trot—around the pitch not just on it but in it. You feel the weight of each of his steps, and every time he lifts a foot along one of his herky-jerky runs, you can practically hear the squelch and see the flecks of the imaginary mud his boot seems to kick up.
The physicality of his game is there in his body language, too. With his hunched shoulders, wobbly trot, reddened cheeks, and his perpetually parted lips huffing in air, he always looks not quite but just about gassed. (Which is another deception; the healthy Pedri has always covered absurd amounts of ground, and he's also an exceptional defender.) Though he has fantastic technique and control, he nevertheless dribbles almost more with his body than with the ball itself, feinting this way and that around the ball with delicate little leans and steps before choosing a direction and then taking the ball along with him. Even the way he strikes the ball isn't the cleanest or most academic. There's a little bit of english on his kicks, as if the ball too is mired in imaginary mud and needs an extra oomph to get it onto Pedri's intended path. Yet in spite of, or maybe due to, the deceptively labored and encumbered nature of his game, Pedri's every movement, every touch exudes a gracefulness that is all his own. Grace in a soccer player is usually reserved for your Iniestas and Zidanes, the immaculate gliders. That Pedri has achieved a state of mucky grace makes him all the more special.
"When I'm on the field, I don't think too much," Pedri once said in an interview with El País. "I improvise. I go with the first thing that comes into my head." That the Spaniard plays with the spontaneity and lightness of someone who is making it all up as he goes is evident when watching him, though it's just as evident that everything he does is with a supreme awareness of his surroundings and a clear purpose in mind, even if the path there remains tantalizingly open-ended. There's no mistaking that Pedri is the boss of this Barcelona team, that it plays where and how he decides. It's just that what he has decided on is a game of free expression and off-the-cuff collaboration, guided more by intuition and talent than anything else. The result is a team that, in its fullest flow, can hit heights no other can match, and a player who is unquestionably one of the most powerful forces in the game today, regardless of position. It may have taken Pedri four years to get from his promising debut season to here, but the wait has been more than worth it.
