In August 2024, I was sure that Barça was a decent team. You couldn’t convince me otherwise because the squad list included players like Pedri, Robert Lewandowski, and Ronald Araujo. These are players that would walk into most starting 11s on the planet, after all. Given recent domestic success—a league title in 2022-23, runners up in 21-22 and 23-24, and a Copa del Rey trophy in 20-21—“decent” felt a little like selling them short, but a European track record of not making it past the quarterfinals since 2018-19 and twice failing to make it out of the group stage in that time, falling down to the Europa where even there humiliation awaited, did not exactly inspire confidence.
Mix in the unknown quantity of Hansi Flick’s arrival, the clear reliance on finding free transfers like Iñigo Martinez to fill gaps in the squad, and a plethora of young but unproven talent, and it honestly hard to imagine how we were even going to finish top 2 or avoid the playoffs in the Champions League. It was less the lack of quality in Barça’s setup than it was the growing pains we were going to experience under a different tactical regime and the reinforcement of rivals.
The arrivals of Mbappe at Real Madrid on a free (with a signing bonus of infinity bajillion euros) and Julian Alvarez at Atletico Madrid for nearly 100 million euros felt like a kick in the teeth given Barça’s financial constraints. The questions about arrivals like Dani Olmo weren’t on fit within the squad or new tactical arrangements, but rather whether we could even field him and Pau Victor at all. How can we splash 65 million euros on a player, given that we were still looking to make up budgetary shortfalls? Indeed, it would take some shenanigans and a couple of unfortunate injuries to get them registered for the first half and eventually some absurd tight rope walking to get them cleared for the second half.
Expectations were low. I can’t point to any now-embarrassing social media posts because I was taking a decent break during my move from The Hell Site to Bluesky, but at least privately I suggested we would go trophyless. And why wouldn’t I? On August 12, Monaco steamrolled us in the Gamper 0-3. We did not feel like a cohesive unit or in any way a team that would make a run for anything. A subsequent loss in the first Champions League match of the new group stage format, also to Monaco, suggested that our “cannot perform in Europe” dynamic was by no means in the rearview mirror and should not be discounted as demonstrating significant problems in squad depth and overall competitiveness.
And then the season started, Lamine Yamal went from “wow, that 16-year old is good” to “Holy crap, that 17-year old is my new religion,” and the team won its first 7 domestic matches. A 4-2 loss to Osasuna at El Sadar felt bad in the moment, but more like an aberration after the next several matches:
5-0 vs Young Boys (CL)
0-3 at Alaves
5-1 vs Sevilla
4-1 vs Bayern Munich (CL)
0-4 at Real Madrid
3-1 vs Espanyol
2-5 at Crvena Zvezda (CL)
7 matches, 29 goals scored, and 5 goals allowed felt incredible. I returned to social media a little bit, saying during the Bayern Munich match that “We are good at football again and it is…I don’t know how to handle this.” And I didn’t. It wasn’t clear then that Real Madrid were a team in trouble (they had lost just once, to Lille in the CL, but had actually outperformed their opponents in almost every metric), but we routed them. It felt fantastic. It felt like we were seriously pushing into a place where we could dream again, not just about the league title we were putting to bed in the first half of the season, but in Europe too.
By late December, we had fallen to 3rd in the league and flirted with disaster in the Champions League. It felt lucky to be where we were in the CL (2nd) after being outperformed for much of the match by Borussia Dortmund. Domestically, we were a mess. We lost 4 of 8, including at home to Las Palmas and Leganés, the former of which is officially relegated and the latter of which is 4 points from safety with 2 matches to go, as well as to Atletico Madrid. That last loss is the one that put us in 3rd and we seemingly cemented our position behind the top 2 with a subsequent draw at Getafe to start the league back up on January 18, but at the same time we were clearly on the up since we won the Spanish Supercopa in Riyadh, smashing 5 past Real Madrid in what could very well have been a thousand goals to 1 had Wojciech Szczęsny not been sent off for a (failed) tackle on Mbappe.
There was a sense of regression to the norm for a few weeks, but after that loss to Atleti in December, the team has not lost in the league again, winning 15 of 17. Both of the draws (home to Getafe and Betis) were statistical anomalies that they should have won given the volume and quality of chances, yet at the same time it was a run that simply felt impossible in early January and a run that, as it went on, felt increasingly likely to end at any moment simply out of sheer exhaustion.
The team has now played 58 matches in all competitions and will reach 60 by the actual end of the season in a couple of weeks. At times they have looked completely worn out and yet also were sprightly against Espanyol in the title-clinching win. They looked as if they could go a full 90 with anyone and, really, if there is a letdown from this season it is in missing that 61st match. In the 92nd minute of the Champions League semifinal, we were all mentally filing our plans for the afternoon of May 31, ready to party it up in Munich—Germany has been kind to us on the European stage before, why not again?—and so to have that taken from us at such a late hour hurt a lot more than it might have otherwise.
Yet now that that immediate pain has subsided and even been replaced by the joy of winning a dramatic clasico and then the league in successive matchdays, it is easy to think of this season as an unbridled success. We not only won the domestic double and accented it with a little supercopa victory, we also beat Real Madrid 4 times in a single season for the first time in our history. We scored 16 goals against them! We blanked them at the Bernabeu, hung a manita on them in January, scored a trophy-winning late goal in April, and all but ensured ourselves the league title at their expense in May. And then went to Espanyol and mathematically secured the title there.
Really, what more do you want out of a season?
Yet, we got so much more. We got joy. We were treated not just to Lamine Yamal’s emergence as a precious possibility, but his arrival as a true force of nature. The season began with a need to use him as sparingly as possible and ended with him as our title-winning goalscorer. It simply jaw-dropping what he is capable of, that the academy has produced such a gem again, and that he is hardly the only home-grown star in the squad. Until January, he wasn’t even the only 17-year old star in the squad, thanks to Pau Cubarsi and even then we’re leaving out Marc Bernal, also 17, who was playing extraordinarily until his injury sidelined him for the rest of the season. Bernal isn’t even the only Marc in the squad whose injury looked like it might derail the season, with ter Stegen’s knee exploding and leaving us all wincing not just at the obvious pain, but also at Iñaki Peña needing to step in. And in he stepped, doing a far better job than I expected before he was replaced by Szczęsny coming out of retirement, cigarette in hand, to become a minor Barça legend.
Coming into the year we felt a bit thin, as I mentioned in the first paragraph. By mid September we seemed like we were full of world beaters. Injuries piled up along with the miles on legs, yet the squad never put its head down.
Bernal, ter Stegen, Gavi, Christensen, Pau Victor, Gavi, and Dani Olmo all missed significant chunks of the year with injuries, yet the team put together not just a winning run, but a fun one. Sure, there were moments when it felt like maybe we should do some more defending, especially in the back half of the season, but in the first 20 matches of the year (up through the lost to Atletico), the team allowed 1.15 goals per match. In the last 16 matches, that number fell to 0.81. The team scored 2.6 goals in the first 20 and 2.81 in the last 16. In all competitions the team scored 169 goals, exactly 100 more than they allowed. A goal difference of plus an entire century is absurd and we were blessed to watch it happen.
Before the season, there were fans calling for Raphinha’s ouster. He scored 34 and got a team-high 22 assists.
Well into the season, I, along with a bunch of others, was calling Ferran a dumb lummox made of crap who should be shot into the sun. He scored 19 and got 7 assists, by far his best scoring record over a season, not just for us, but in his entire career.
There were those questioning the wisdom of the Lewandowski signing despite his goal tally last season. He scored 40.
Obviously Lamine Yamal was good, but bagged 17 goals and got 21 assists, which was just a revelation despite the entire season seeming to be a litany of “I can’t wait to see how he’s going to top THAT one.” Well, the answer was his goal of goals to win the league against Espanyol. I can’t wait to see how he tops that one.
Jules Kounde clearly accepted his position at right back and lit up the season, even grabbing 4 goals, including the one to win the Copa del Rey in extra time.
Pedri is a god, full stop. The greatest bargain in Barça transfer history?
Frenkie de Jong seemed on the outs and then he was suddenly indispensable, making 23 starts, most of them in the 2nd half of season and going the distance in all of the major matches down the stretch except the Copa del Rey final where he put in 84 minutes.
Eric Garcia was destined for Girona until he wasn’t and then he slowly worked his way into the good graces of the manager, ending up with 43 appearances and 17 starts. It felt weird to rely on him at right back for the last clasico and even weirded to realize he was doing a very good job against Vinicius as well as making strong forward runs.
Apparently being named Marc and playing for Barcelona makes you very good, but also you are doomed to get injured. Marc Casadó was billed as the one who would make a huge impact this season, came out flat, and looked decidedly less capable than Bernal before suddenly becoming a fantastic player who understood the assignments and played well. He only made 36 appearances because of injury, but he still has 500 more minutes than both Eric Garcia and Ferran Torres as well as 600 more than Dani Olmo and Fermin Lopez. And he also made an appearance at Canalets after we won the title, singing with the fans late into the night and absolutely endearing himself to me forever. Make him captain. Make him president.
In August I was sure we were decent.
It’s May and now I know we’re spectacular.
What a season, what a ride, what an absolute blast. The trophies feel like something of a secondary thing to the fun I had, but of course winning and getting the hardware is part of it. I didn’t see how we would radically improve by getting rid of Xavi and retaining the same squad, but I was also convinced that Xavi’s lack of willingness to change his assistants was strangling what was a talented group of players. We’ll never know the extent to which the manager changing was the difference and whether or not new assistants would have helped Xavi overcome some of the roadblocks he encountered, but we can still give Flick full credit here. He has really, really done the thing and we can all be proud of the players, the staff, and the club for this season.
Oh and next year in the Camp Nou? I’m giddy already.