Barcelona enters Sunday’s Clasico at the Santiago Bernabeu tied for first place in La Liga with Real Madrid, having conceded just one league goal all season.
Despite well-documented financial difficulties, the club spent 145 million euros on players in the summer, raising eyebrows, but at first glance, the numbers would suggest the gamble was paying off on the field.
Statistics in football should be taken with a grain of salt at times.
Their last six La Liga games without conceding a goal have come against teams like Real Valladolid, Cadiz, Elche, and Real Mallorca, all of which aren’t known for scoring goals.
Stats also fail to reveal that on numerous occasions, only the outstanding play of goalkeeper Marc-Andre ter Stegen has kept the opposition at bay.
It’s a different story when the bigger boys arrive, especially when you don’t have your first-choice defenders to take them on.
Barcelona has already conceded seven goals in four Champions League matches this season, losing two, drawing one, and winning one.
The pulsating 3-3 draw against Inter Milan on Wednesday, which was loved by the neutral but despised by Barcelona coach Xavi, almost certainly means they will have to start planning their Europa League campaign very soon.
Inter only need to defeat Viktoria Plzen, who have conceded 16 goals in four games this season, to ensure that Barcelona do not qualify for the Champions League knockout stages for the second year in a row.
Next up is the Clasico, and Real Madrid, who are right up there with the biggest of them all in terms of ‘big boy’ competitions.
It will be chaos if Barcelona loses to Real Madrid.
Bad news for Barcelona
The two teams are neck and neck at the top of the table after an unbeaten start to the season in which they have both dropped only two points out of a possible 24.
Something has to give, and the hints as to where that will come from were clear in their recent Champions League games.
Real Madrid traveled to Warsaw to play Shakhtar Donetsk, and it took a last-gasp header from Antonio Rudiger to salvage a point.
With nine points already on the board, there could have been a hint of complacency in their performance, as well as some squad rotation.
In Barcelona, Xavi rallied the troops by referring to the game as a “cup final,” and for the first 45 minutes, everything appeared to be going as planned.
High up the pitch, there was a lot of pressure, crosses, shots from outside the box, and players finding each other between the lines.
Everything was fine until halftime. What possibly could go wrong?
Well, as it turned out, pretty much everything. They made a mistake early in the second half, and the floodgates opened.
The game shifted from a measured, planned approach to box-to-box football the moment Gerard Pique forgot to look around to the Inter attackers and the first goal was conceded. That was too much for Pique, Eric Garcia, and Marcos Alonso to handle.
Barcelona played the game as if there was only one minute left. The game devolved into a lottery, and the best you can say is that at least two saves by Ter Stegen near the end mean that there are still slim chances going into the next matchday.
So we have a Barcelona that can only do what Xavi wants for 45 minutes, a team that is fine until things get difficult, and then they can’t cope. A team that thinks in two ways about what needs to be done – Xavi wants control, but the players prefer to attack quickly.
Clearly, Xavi is only at the first stage of this new educational process at the Nou Camp, which is bad news when you’re about to face a Real Madrid team that graduated with honors years ago and knows how to raise the level when it matters.
