Not a blip – Barcelona’s recent slump a result of deeper cracks | OneFootball

It’s time to go back a few weeks to the night at Estadi Montilivi. Barcelona took on Girona in La Liga on the back of a humiliating 4-0 defeat to Atletico Madrid in the Copa del Rey semi-finals first leg.

One defining image from that game arrived after Barcelona did the hard part. After what felt like an eternity since a Hansi Flick team last scored a goal, Pau Cubarsi netted a brilliant header that saw the entire fanbase exhale.

The subsequent script expected control. A pause, a spell of possession and a desire to score a second goal that put the game to bed. Instead, three minutes later, the ball was in Barcelona’s net.

This is a sequence that has repeated itself so many times over the course of the season that it stops being a coincidence and starts becoming a pattern. In a high-wire act like the one Barça play under Flick, it is important to focus, especially when you think you are ahead of the curve.

That little sequence: joy, turnover, transition and punishment is the entire season in a nutshell.

This recent slump isn’t necessarily a flash in the pan but a consequence of months of living on thin margins: a defensive system that demands perfection, reinforcements that never fully matched the needs and a bench that doesn’t always match up to the first-team’s pedigree.

Barcelona have bounced back since with an impressive 3-0 win over Levante at the Spotify Camp Nou, but that doesn’t paper over the structural cracks. If anything, it underlines just how good this team can be and how they are not doing it consistently enough.

The crack that keeps re-appearing: defence during transitions

Hansi Flick has been repeatedly highlighting where things went wrong, both against Atletico Madrid and Girona. He was less than happy with the easy losses of possession and wanted his team to improve on this regard.

It has increasingly become the case that opponents don’t need to outplay Barcelona for 90 minutes. All they need is 10 seconds of ruthlessness to capitalise on an unforced error, convert it into a transition and before anyone realises, Barcelona find themselves a goal down.

Atletico Madrid exploited Barça’s vulnerabilities perfectly. (Photo by Angel Martinez/Getty Images)

This is why the Girona moment matters; it is a deceptive microcosm of a problem Barcelona have had all season: the rest-defence.

When the safety net is as thin as Flick’s system has, one player being late by a second in the counter-press is all it takes for the fragility to show its teeth.

The high line: a double-edged sword

Under Flick, Barcelona intend to squeeze the pitch and pin their opposition as high as possible. They want to win the ball back before the opponent can have a whiff and keep attacking to try and score as many goals as possible.

To do this, the team needs to play a very high line. It is, in every definition of the word, a ‘double-edged’ sword. When it works, as it did for the majority of last season, it makes the team extremely potent. When it doesn’t, it becomes an open runway for the opponents.

So far in the 2025/26 season, the high-line has been a mixed bag. Teams have started devising strategies to break open Barcelona’s structure and have done it to much better effect than they did last year.

A high line simply doesn’t translate to defending high. It’s like a well-choreographed symphony where all the movements need to be synchronised: the pressure off the ball, the backline stepping up together, closing passing lanes and attackers acting as first defenders.

Even if one player fails to do his job, the system turns into instant panic. The kind of perfection this system demands is unsustainable when injuries have hampered the squad and when important cogs like Pedri and Raphinha are absent for significant chunks.

Reinforcements: the squad built under constraint, not desire

Barcelona’s squad building hasn’t happened in a vacuum. The club have been transparent about navigating the debt, La Liga’s financial control rules and the return to the 1:1 rule, which almost feels like a mirage at this point.

When reinforcements are limited, the coach is forced to work with the existing tools at his disposal. While they may still be great, some of them come with limitations – a general sense of not fitting the system.

That brings us on to one of the few reinforcements the club have made in recent years: Joan Garcia.

Joan Garcia and the art of plastering over cracks

Joan Garcia has come to Barça’s rescue on several occasions. (Photo by Juan Manuel Serrano Arce/Getty Images)

Barcelona signed Joan Garcia in the summer from local rivals Espanyol. It was a position that the team desperately needed to reinforce, and they managed quite a coup with one of the best upcoming shot-stoppers in the sport.

Throughout the season, Garcia has consistently pulled off the impossible. He has made saves that he had no right to make, and in his own words, it isn’t a good sign for the team if he is having to make as many stops as he is.

In many games, the Spaniard has made the team look much better than they were and the scoreline look much kinder than it should have been.

In the Girona sequence, the problem is obvious. The team lost possession cheaply in midfield, the distance between players was wrong, the sprint back was frantic and ultimately, Garcia has no chance of stopping a problem that could have been avoided.

A great goalkeeper can steal points and can also make a team look much better than they actually are. Just ask Manchester United fans and David de Gea during his prime years. That is exactly what Garcia has been doing this season for Barcelona.

The bench: when the drop-off changes the team’s intensity

If the starting XI is a well-oiled machine, the bench needs to be made up of spare parts that can keep the machine going without a drop-off in output.

When a team like Barcelona are sometimes asked to play three matches in a week, they struggle to maintain the same kind of intensity. The pressing drops in the absence of certain players, leaving Flick with little to no choice in terms of rotation.

By the second half of the Girona game, Barcelona were evidently leggy. However, Flick didn’t trust the options on his bench enough to turn the game in his side’s favour, which isn’t an ideal sign for a team that desires to compete on all fronts.

This brings us on to an unhealthy dependency factor on two players in this squad: Raphinha and Pedri.

Pedri, the oxygen and Raphinha, the ignition

Yes, every team has players that they consider untouchable, and Barcelona have two of them: Raphinha and Pedri. The drop-off in standards when they are not on the pitch is scary.

Pedri had been missing for the better part of a month due to a hamstring injury, and in his absence, it felt like the Barça midfield forgot how to breathe. The Canary Islander isn’t just a creator. He stabilises and controls games that threaten to run away from the team.

Barça look a completely different team without Raphinha and Pedri. (Photo by Fran Santiago/Getty Images)

Without him, the possession might still exist, but it feels either very sterile or hurried. A hurried Barcelona is a vulnerable Barcelona, as it plays right into the opponent’s hands, making it an end-to-end game.

Raphinha, on the other hand, is often the spark. His intensity sets the tone for the entire team and there is a reason Flick loves him so much. He gives the team the much-needed aggression to win the ball back high up the pitch and doesn’t stop running for one second.

Against Girona, Pedri was absent and Raphinha played only around an hour of football. Against Atletico Madrid, both players were unavailable. It is no coincidence that Barça played some of their worst football this season when either one or both players have been missing.

Flick’s overperformance and the price that he has to pay

The argument that Barcelona’s slump has been some time coming isn’t a dismissal of Hansi Flick. It’s actually the opposite.

The truth is that the German manager has gotten this Barcelona squad to overperform for a season and a half, thereby reducing the margin of error that he has.

He has motivated the team to find ways to win, despite injuries, fatigue and lapses in concentration, through his managerial prowess. However, he hasn’t been backed sufficiently in transfer windows, a trend that was always going to come back to bite the club.

So the slump isn’t shocking. It’s predictable. To keep riding the wave over the course of 38 games in a season and hoping that you end on the right side of it every time just isn’t feasible and Barcelona are learning that the hard way.

What needs to change now?

The Levante game offered a lot of promise from a Barcelona perspective. It was nice to see players like Joao Cancelo and Marc Bernal, who are not first-choice starters, put their hands up and perform exceedingly well.

Barcelona don’t need to abandon Flick’s philosophy. They need to find a way to protect and insulate it.

From a team’s perspective, this means cleaner decisions in possession, being focused for the entire 90 minutes, avoiding unforced errors, pressing with intensity and doing everything their coach is asking of them.

For a club and specifically a sporting director’s perspective, this means making signings in the upcoming summer in areas where the pipes have started to leak beyond a fix. Signing a centre-back and striker in the summer is non-negotiable.

A lot of work still needs to be done, and one can hope that the summer of 2026 is when Barcelona realise that Flick is not a magician and that he needs to be backed the right way to take this squad to the next level.