The REASON Why BARCELONA can win the CHAMPIONS LEAGUE!
Barcelona reach the Champions League quarter-finals for the first time since 2020!
"I told the players to stay calm, nobody was going to die today. The press were saying we were the buffoons in the Champions League, unfair criticism from journalists. Was that necessary? Are we still the buffoons?" Xavi said after beating Napoli.
This season, Barça looks like one of the Champions League's dark horses - no one expects them to succeed, with some experts expecting the Blaugrana to be thrashed in the final eight, just like they were in the summer of 2020 when Bayern Munich defeated Barcelona 8-2.
Still, such expectations demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of what Xavi's current project is all about. If at the end of January Barcelona looked like an unbalanced team, the team that didn't have a clue what they were playing, then now it's a completely different thing. A month and a half has passed since Xavi announced his retirement at the end of the season - the manager pulled this trick in order to "release" public pressure from his players and start from scratch. Well, believe it or not, it has had BROUGHT UNBELIEVABLE RESULTS: after the defeat versus Villarreal, the Catalans played 9 matches, 6 which they won and drew three times - in other words, since the shocking announcement, the Spanish giants have not been beaten, netting 18 goals and conceding 7 - on average, they now score 2 goals per game and concedes less than 1 goal. The gap to Girona in La Liga was reduced to 1 point and to 8 points behind Real Madrid - 10 matchdays before the league's finishing line and Barça are still in the race. Moreover, Xavi's men also showed their best in the duel with the reigning Italian champions Napoli - a confident performance in both legs that resulted in a total score of 4:2.
Give us a like if you are stunned by Barcelona's mid-season transformation and are genuinely happy about the success of Xavi's team!
"People didn't believe me. I said that the team would be released if I announced my decision to step aside at the end of the season. So what now? We're in the quarter finals, as one of the top 8 teams in Europe. We showed that we're a Champions League level team."
After Barcelona's display against Napoli, no one can deny their UCL final stages level. The team's pressing and attacking was at the top, thus they looked much stronger than the Parthenopeans in both legs:
"We put in a very complete performance. The team was very good with and without the ball, and we dominated many aspects of the game," noted a happy Xavi in his post-match interview.
As of this moment, when people talk about the Champions League favorites, everyone primarily mentions Manchester City, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, and Inter Milan. You know, Barça are often mentioned rather as underdogs, in whom almost no one believes, though we have a slightly different opinion.
"Barça, which comes out on the pitch with motivation, intensity and putting pressure on the opponents, makes a team capable of competing against anyone," Sport.es director Joan Vehils wrote after the game.
There is no doubt that Barca can be quite an uncomfortable opponent for any team in the quarter-finals.
Today's Barcelona stands out as a well-balanced top team with its own stylish sides. The turning point of the season for Blaugrana was definitely the clash versus Alaves, in which Xavi experimented with Christensen as a defensive midfielder, or as they say nowadays - a 'false defender'. The transformation of the Dane, who is able to win a duel on any pitch area and possesses a great vision, had finally balanced the roster, which suffered without an elite defensive midfielder of Busquets' caliber.
Andreas is not perfect in this position, but his defensive work and the way the Catalans' squad has been rebuilt since then has CHANGED EVERYTHING! They are now a very complex but very well-oiled mechanism - the return of ter Stegen has also given the necessary a boost in terms of reliability on the back. Speaking about defense, Barcelona plays with 4 defenders - Kounde, Araujo, Cubarsi and Cancelo, but when attacking, it's just the Kounde-Araujo-Cubarsi trio on the back, while João moves to the left fullback or winger role. Christensen gets placed not far from the back three so that as soon as the possession is lost, he can immediately cover the space needed to stop the opponent's attacking attempt. As for the midfield, here Barça counts on Gündogan, Frenkie and Pedri - however, when two of them picked up injuries, Fermin and Raphinha took the spotlight, since both of them can be used on the left side of the attack or in the center. At last, the attacking line, where the key role is given to Lewandowski, Yamal and Raphinha - Felix, Roque or Guiu may step into action as substitutes.