Flick's Barcelona shows a dominant and controlled football that contrasts with Valencia's crisis

The pessimists no longer have anyone to write to them. We are referring to the culés, obviously. Flick's Barça has a plan that has no problems that deserve a review. The Blaugrana group has started the season like a rocket. In Mestalla, a former pressure cooker now turned in on itself, he gave the impression of winning before starting as soon as the lineup was known. Rodri and Lamine Yamal, starters. The best player of the last World Cup and one of the most amazing emergences that can be remembered from a young footballer.

If only that were it.

Barça has reached a point where, to those intimidating names for anyone, they add a team that has been sculpting itself for two years to feel prepared for anything. Now it is. Large squad to play two games a week (there are twenty potential starters), a coach with total power in the locker room and aerial coverage in the box, and an increasingly polished football idea that has not lost its original intention along the way: vertigo, advanced defense and submission to the opponent. It happens that now all the movements are more adjusted and the risks, consequently, more controlled. With the ball, Barça attacks with everything and everyone at a devilish speed. On television it is a joy but for opponents, a nightmare. The combinations of Lamine Yamal, Raphinha, Gordon and Fermín on the front or already inside the area are very difficult to intuit, especially when they are executed with the first touch. Triangles, squares and walls. Geometry. Fermín is as if possessed. Not playing in the World Cup has turned him into a voracious footballer, as if they owed him something.

If only that were it.

When Barça loses the ball they organize by memory. Occupy the designated spaces to suffocate your rivals with small but intense collective races. The order has been accentuated in that sense with the entry of Rodri, a boss player. Pedri is his squire now, which is like having a prime minister as his right hand. The balls recovered in the boots of these two guys are velvet. One is not raffled off.

If only that were it.

At the rear of this whole setup is the Catalan defense, which is not a chess move but Joan Garcia, Eric Garcia, Cubarsí, Gerard Martín and Xavi Espart together. It is a fact to boast about and that accentuates the exceptionality of this team, since it adds an accent of proximity to the excellence of its game. That is, pride of belonging. Apart from that, they defend fabulously, which is what it's all about.

The only fear in Valencia was that Gordon would get lipothymia under that scorching heat. And it didn't happen.

Everything described about this Barcelona serves, by contrast, to define Valencia. What is left over for some, others have not tasted for years. Salvador Enguix already warned us in a devastating article titled “The sinking of Valencia”, an accurate x-ray of a profound social, economic and, obviously, sporting crisis.

While they were distributing the lineups with Rodri's first start, in the stands you could already hear the “Peter go now” addressed to the club's owner, Peter Lim. All the pessimists in the world are in Valencia.