The Good, the Bad, the Beautiful: The voodoo child, end of an era and initial reaction to genius | OneFootball

A round-up of some of La Liga’s most intriguing storylines across the week, traversing through the good, the bad and something beautiful.

The Good: Raphinha is back – Voodoo child (slight return)

There is something that Raphinha does to this Barcelona side. He might not be the most aesthetic of Barcelona’s many brilliant footballers, nor the most rounded, but he is undisputably one of two or three ingredients that they cannot make do without. No matter how many times Hansi Flick talks about pressing high, or encourages his other forwards to be breathing in the ears of their opposition, Raphinha has a way of making this Barcelona team move that nobody else does.

As if to illustrate the point, with Barcelona finally beginning to find grooves in Newcastle United’s own press, when Jacob Ramsey aired a blind pass across his box, Raphinha was already in flight onto the ball to punish the error. Three days before, Raphinha had the scruffiest of hat-tricks handed to him at Sevilla, two penalties and a deflected shot, but it was symbolic of the increased mobility he was showing.

Aggressive, at times unorthodox, always fiery, he seems to be able to drag his teammates into the positions that Flick wants them in. Something about his intensity, his charisma, has a magnetic pull over this Barcelona. Against Newcastle, Raphinha scored the first, took the set-piece for the second, won the penalty for the third, assisted the fourth, assisted the fifth and scored the sixth. Eight key contributions in the space of four days. Raphinha puts the moves to the music, and in turn, makes sense of the Barcelona with the highest expected downfall (xD) in European football.

The Bad: The end of an era – Eskerrik Asko, Ernesto Valverde

Rest assured, this topic was coming in spite of Ernesto Valverde’s announcement that he would be leaving Athletic Club this summer. On Saturday, Athletic Club succumbed to a 3-0 defeat to Girona. Goalkeeper Paulo Gazzaniga made some smart stops, but the defeat was neither surprising nor particularly undeserved. Michel Sanchez has managed to rebuild his side on the fly, and the contrast to Athletic hurt a little, stuck in the monotony of a press that doesn’t quite work, and an attack that that nobody really enjoys.

Athletic Club have three wins in 2026 in La Liga, and it dates back to a victory over Atletico Madrid at San Mames on the 6th of December, a period that encapsulates 11 games. Truth is, Athletic were not in great shape before it either. This week Elche descended into the relegation zone, conveniently to make the point that those wins came against their fellow struggling promoted sides Levante and Real Oviedo.

The hope has to be that with this end now in sight, the mindset can change, and Athletic can finally wake up to the fact that they are just three points off a likely European spot. Before it started, the season threatened to be the end of Valverde’s cycle, and only remnants remain of arguably the best Athletic side in the 21st century between 2023 and 2025. This is but the natural life cycle of a football manager. The duty now, for Athletic as a club, and as a squad, is to ensure Ernesto Valverde’s 10-game funeral march must be a celebration of life, not a lament.

The Beautiful: ‘No, Arda, no’

Pulling back the curtain, after Nicolas Pepe’s 97th minute equaliser against Alaves at a wet Mendizorrotza, it had all been decided that it would be our beautiful moment of the week. There’s something seductive about such a dramatic contrast of relief and anguish, that perhaps doesn’t reflect well on us.

Only for Arda Guler to selfishly steal the show with a goal that accepts no argument on the matter. Just the 68.6 metres separated him from goal when he drove it over the head of Matias Dituro, bouncing satisfyingly into the empty net. It has all the hallmarks of genius. The execution is something – Guler has tried this three times, hit the bar once, and wasn’t far off the other time. Cast your mind back through the fellow goalscorers of similar strikes. Xabi Alonso had something of penchant for it, David Beckham, Wayne Rooney, it doesn’t really occur to most players to even try it, because it’s such a ridiculously low percentage shot.

Forgive us for being a tad sceptical of La Liga and Microsoft’s goal probability percentage at times, but on this occasion, the 0.1% feels accurate. Guler now has a one in three conversation rate. “It’s worth the price of the ticket, maybe two or three times over, to see what he’s done,” Alvaro Arbeloa observed after the game. “No, Arda, no,” was his first reaction while he was taking the shot. Perhaps he was thinking of poor Dituro, conspicuously not in the Elche goal.