Opinion: Barcelona, a different shade of blaugrana

For the moment FC Barcelona aren’t the best club in La Liga wearing a blaugrana.  Levante, who have never until now even graced Barça’s shadow, much less stood above them in points, are playing more industrious, efficient and convincing football.  Beyond that, Levante’s industry on the pitch is remarkably exciting to watch, while Barça’s style, forever their raison d’etre and architect of their success, seems to be slipping a little.  Before they host Mallorca tomorrow, I wanted to identify a few small things about that style that I think are having a large effect on Barça’s season.

For the first time in a while the club looks to be labouring with the ball.  As simple as it sounds, this is a big deal.  When they have been at their best these past few years, Barça have looked effortless.  Of course all teams look great when they are at their best, but Barca’s success has been largely a product of their style, far more than tactic or brute force.  And their style is one-touch pass heavy, possession that seems to move endlessly up the pitch.  They attack, for example, and score far more than would be expected given how much possession they enjoy.  For them to be outworked on the pitch means that the one thing that they do better than every other club is going wrong.

I wrote a few months ago that tika-taka is a bit of a misleading phrase when describing Barça’s style.  The connotation, and onomatopoeia, suggests something inoffensive and happy, as though they’re just out to play keep-away until impatience gets the better of their opponents and, from nowhere in particular, the Catalans sneak in a goal.  Barça’s style, of course, is overwhelmingly pass heavy: back passes; short passes; chip passes; bending passes into space; sliding passes through the final line of defence; and that’s a mere minute of play.  But there is hardly anything sneaky about how they play, and to say that they seek to lull their opponents into submission would admit that they tailor their style to an opposition they seldom seem to notice at all.  This isn’t to say Barça are naive in their approach, and tactically speaking they’re adaptable (see their Valencia match earlier this season).  But in terms of style they’re callous and unwavering in their gracefulness, since its heart isn’t the middle of the pitch but the back of the net.

And so when they labour with the ball, when they are out-run, out-passed or out worked, and they cannot score, it’s not just that they are having an off night.  It’s that the very thing that makes them unique among clubs disappears.  Without that, they look rather normal, which is a problem for them in that it seems like they cannot win this year if they look rather normal.  When things go wrong for them, it’s often hard to tell exactly how wrong they are going, especially when are not losing any games.

There does seem to be one growing trend in their draws: they are not able overwhelm opponents, which, as I mentioned above, I believe they need to do in order to be successful.  I mean totally overwhelm, in the sense of victory (for their opponents) being utterly, or even just practically, out of reach. Their last match against Granada aside (a forgettable 1-0 result from their most reluctant goal scorer Xavi), Barça have either drawn or won by three goals at least. In their four draws this season (the 2-2 Valencia match; 2-2 at Real Sociedad; 2-2 against Milan in the Champions League; 0-0 at home this weekend against Sevilla) Barcelona have largely been lulled into attacking, which sounds like an odd criticism of a side that have also won three games by at least five goals, but-and this may sound very, very odd-they have drawn those games in part because of impatience.

Barça are, as much as any top European club, very good in front of the goal. But what distinguishes them, and where their style really shows, are the assists to the assists; Xavi’s long ball to Dani Alves which leads to Alves’ cross into a cutting Pedro or Villa; Iniesta’s one-touch give-and-go with Messi leading into the box, five passes before anyone gets off a shot.  In other words, they are most effective when they let their opponents forget, for a moment, that they are looking to score every single moment of the game. And they look more rushed to score this year than they have in the past.

They press harder and longer, and, consequently, the task of the team defending them is straightforward and unchanging, more so than it would be if the run of play was a bit more erratic. If an opponent, like Sevilla this past weekend, can disrupt those pre-assist passes without breaking up their back line (which is a tall, tall order: Sevilla’s back line was the straightest line of four people in constant motion I’ve ever seen) then Barça’s threat begins to disappear: if Barça’s attack is not changing the character of the defence, then they become stoic, even in motion. This is where their impatience showed last Saturday, as they pressed so hard that there was frankly nowhere to go.

Barça have the talent, and poise, to overcome all of this, and if Sevilla’s Varas had been off on just one of his countless saves of the night Barça would have walked away with a win.  Against Granada, that is essentially what happened. But they remain limited, and vulnerable, when they cannot dominate the score sheet, which would not be as serious if they were, as expected, atop the table. Instead, it’s Levante.

Maxwell Kuhl can be followed on Twitter here.

Tags: Barcelona, Fabregas, Guardiola, Levante, Messi, Thiago, Xavi