In preseason, Barça’s new coach Hansi Flick pulled Robert Lewandowski aside. He told him two things. First, the Polish forward needed to run more or else he’d be out of the team. Second, he advised him to make friends with Lamine Yamal – whose performances in at Euro 2024 finals were scandalous for a 16-year-old boy – because the youngster was the team’s star now.
Lewandowski, who previous coach Xavi Hernández wanted to sell, arguing a team couldn’t function with a 36-year-old striker, took note. He’s enjoying a second youth, having already smashed in 40 goals this season, the first time that notable barrier has been broken at Barça since Lionel Messi did it during the 2018-19 season.
Lewandowski’s goals are propelling Barça towards a possible treble, an unimaginable haul given their starting point last summer. Rivals Atletico Madrid rearmed off-season – Julián Alvarez their marquee transfer from a spend of close to €200 million. Real Madrid, coming off the back of a Champions League-La Liga double, had just landed Kylian Mbappé, the biggest star in football.
Barça were wracked with financial problems. To help balance the books, the club had to kick İlkay Gündoğan, their best performer last season, back to Manchester City on a free transfer with a year left to run on his contract. Their only significant outlay was €60 million spent on Dani Olmo.
Barça president Joan Laporta’s biggest bet was signing Flick as manager. Laporta is enamoured of “the German school” – those coaches in the vanguard of football tactics, including Jürgen Klopp, Thomas Tuchel and Julian Nagelsmann. For various reasons, to do with availability and cost, the best Laporta could do was to hire Flick, the first German national team coach in history to be sacked.
Flick, whose salary is cheaper than his predecessor Xavi, has been a revelation. He has keen instincts. In September, he showed up at a wreath-laying ceremony at the monument of Rafael Casanova in Barcelona to mark La Diada, Catalonia’s national holiday, which has been a politically charged date in the calendar for Catalan separatists since 2012. When a high-profile foreigner makes a gesture like that, it leaves Catalans purring like kittens.
There’s nothing flash about Flick. Aged 60, he dresses like a roadie – in jeans and a black bomber jacket. His poise is a blessing in a club prone to hysteria like Barça, something worth taking note of at, say, woe-begotten Manchester United, a sporting institution with similar footballing and financial problems, which easily swept aside Barça only two seasons ago in the Europa League.
Flick, who coached Bayern Munich to a treble in 2020, abhors victimismo. He never looks for excuses, unlike Xavi. He doesn’t complain about refereeing decisions. When he lost Marc-André Ter Stegen, one of the world’s best goalkeepers, in September to a serious knee injury, there was no drama. Flick persisted with reserve keeper Iñaki Peña until he had time to blood in Wojciech Szczęsny, lured out of retirement for one last heist.
Partly from necessity, partly from courage and conviction, Flick has mined La Masia, the club’s youth academy, to fix problems. When Barça humiliated Real Madrid in their own house earlier in the season, winning 4-0, Barça fielded six La Masia graduates in their starting XI, excluding Pedri, who has been a fixture since breaking into the team as a 17-year-old signed from Las Palmas.
The Flick method is based on clear ideas and clear communication. He’s strict – Jules Koundé, arguably the most in-form wing back in the world, has been dropped twice because he arrived late for team meetings. He’s devised an effective system, based on a high defensive line, tigerish pressing and “verticality”, as they say in Spain – getting the ball to the opposition box as quickly as possible, no more putting the game to sleep endlessly circulating the ball, an old Barça tiki-taka device.
Flick’s football is thrilling, embodied in the scintillating form of Yamal and Raphinha on the wings. Flick has resurrected the careers of several players under suspicion. These include Lewandowski; Frenkie de Jong, thriving in a double pivot role alongside Pedri; Ferran Torres, the team’s utility forward is averaging a goal every 79 minutes this season; and especially Raphinha, on track to break the Champions League record for most goals and assists in a season.
If the Brazilian’s transformation is Flick’s best success story at Barça, Pedri is the gift he’s most grateful for. It’s impossible to take your eyes off Pedri, fit again after three seasons struggling with muscle injuries. There isn’t a better midfielder in the world right now. He’s the conductor of Barça’s orchestra, seeing passes others don’t, or are unable to execute.
Pedri rinses the team’s play. For such a small, wan footballer, it’s counter-intuitive that he’s such a good defender – tracking backwards, eating up the pitch with his big engine, reading the play, cutting out danger, stealing the ball back, re-launching attacks. In crowded spaces, the ball seems to bounce and bobble and follow him, as if by magic. And when he’s facing forward, he puts the burners on to accelerate away from defenders.
It’s strange Barça fans yet don’t have a chant for Yamal, but at home, a few times a game, the stadium erupts in guttural chanting for “Pedri, Pedri, Pedri!”. As Mallorca’s coach, Jagoba Arrasate, acknowledged after his side’s defeat to Barça during the week in La Liga, the Canary Islander is playing at a higher level: “Pedri is a joy to watch on TV, but a nightmare to face on the pitch ... I haven’t seen a midfielder like him in a very long time.”
The only doubt about Barça is that they will run out of gas. Flick has been operating with a short squad of about 17-18 key players. The relentless run of games – Barça will play nine games in April, for example – is taking its toll. Their unbeaten run in 2025 came to an end against Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League quarter final second-leg, although Barça progressed 5-3 on aggregate.
Injuries are piling up. Already shorn of Ter Stegen, Flick will be missing Lewandowski for Saturday’s Copa del Rey final in Seville, only the eighth time in the tournament’s 122-year history eternal rivals Barça and Real Madrid meet in the final. Also out is the electrifying Alejandro Balde. The callow Gerard Martín, his replacement at left back, is an Achilles’ heel, and will be targeted.
Real Madrid, dumped out of the Champions League by Arsenal, have their own problems. Coach Carlo Ancelotti is on borrowed time. The question on everyone’s lips is: how is it possible Real Madrid are worse with Mbappé in the team than last season? Mbappé is scoring goals, 32 already, but his arrival has unbalanced the team, which is light on defensive cover, has to carry two players who don’t press (Mbappé and Vinícius Júnior) and has yet to replace the team’s playmaker, Toni Kroos, who retired last summer.
Real Madrid have their backs to the wall. Having already lost heavily twice to Barça this season – in the league and a 5-2 defeat in the Spanish Super Cup final – the Madridistas won’t want a third embarrassment. It should be a cracker.
Copa del Rey final: Barcelona v Real Madrid, Estadio de La Cartuja, Seville, Saturday, 9pm (Live on Premier Sports and TNT)
Five of the Best El Clásico Copa del Rey Finals
♦ 1936 (Mestalla, Valencia): Real Madrid 2 Barcelona 1 – On the eve of the Spanish Civil War, Barça’s team, coached by Dubliner Patrick O’Connell, lost by a goal in a game remembered for Ricardo Zamora’s “impossible save” which denied Josep Escolà a late equaliser.
♦ 1968 (Santiago Bernabéu, Madrid): Real Madrid 0 Barcelona 1 – An early own-goal (a howler) was enough for Barça to deny Real Madrid a domestic “double” in their own stadium, a defeat that enraged Real Madrid’s fans, who rained bottles down on Barça’s players in the team’s most notorious cup final encounter.
♦ 1983: (La Romareda, Zaragoza): Barcelona 2 Real Madrid 1 – Marcos, the now deceased father of former Chelsea player Marcos Alonso, scored an acrobatic flying header in the 90th minute to secure Diego Maradona’s first trophy as a Barça player. Remembered also for Bernd Schuster giving “the bird” to Real Madrid’s fans in celebration.
♦ 2011 (Mestalla, Valencia): Real Madrid 1 Barcelona 0 – Spain was on a knife edge as Barça and Real Madrid played four clásicos in 18 days, fixtures enlivened by José Mourinho’s Machiavellian antics as Real Madrid coach. In their cup final encounter, Real Madrid prevailed with a thunderous header from Cristiano Ronaldo in extra time.
♦ 2014 (Mestalla, Valencia): Real Madrid 2 Barcelona 1 – Real Madrid won thanks to a late goal of galloping genius by Gareth Bale in which he sprinted 70 metres, some of it outside the white lines, with the ball before scoring.
