Barcelona look worryingly at home in the Europa League
Barcelona playing in the Europa League feels against the natural order of things, but by the end of a 1-1 draw with Napoli they looked every inch a second-tier side.
Barcelona on a Thursday night, slugging it out with Napoli to try and reach a Europa League last-16 stage that already has West Ham in it by right. All feels a bit wrong, doesn’t it? Confusing and discombobulating.
There’s a strange dreamlike quality to it; all the individual elements make sense, but they’re all just slightly out of context. And that sensation is only heightened by Barcelona having a familiarly unfamiliar starting front three of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang flanked by Adama Traore and Ferran Torres.
The whole confusing mess is very Barcelona in 2022, a club where Luuk De Jong offers more in a 20-minute cameo from the bench than Frenkie De Jong had all night and in which their own player Ousmane Dembele has his every touch booed.
And the match itself was a curious one as well, one which Barcelona largely dominated but didn’t really deserve to win and were quite lucky to draw via a marginal penalty awarded after a VAR intervention.
That penalty was converted by Torres, who otherwise endured a nightmare evening as his struggles since returning to Spain continue. He missed four hugely presentable chances in the first half in varyingly embarrassing fashions, the worst of which after being sent clear by a clearly now much happier Aubameyang compounded by being instantly followed by Napoli’s breakaway opening goal. It was a bad goal all round for Barca, who switched off after Torres’ miss while Pedri clearly saw and then inexplicably failed to track the run of goalscorer Piotr Zielinski before Marc-Andre ter Stegen saved the Poland midfielder’s first shot but only managed to bounce it straight back to him for another go.
Traore had his moments too and had clearly been the subject of much of a well-drilled and well-organised Napoli side’s preparation for this one. He rarely found himself with fewer than two minders during his 65 minutes on the pitch, and it’s an indictment of this iteration of Barcelona that they don’t have enough quality elsewhere to take advantage of the inevitable spaces created elsewhere.
Aubameyang looked far closer to the player we all know than the empty husk of a man who has been going through the motions at the Emirates this season, but Torres was a desperate disappointment despite his goal. Even after the penalty he still spurned a further chance later on to win the game as Napoli hunkered down to take a draw back to Italy for the second leg.
Barca weren’t terrible here by any stretch and may well go through in the return leg. But that in itself sort of sums up where they are. It might be acceptable for most clubs to be probably just about the fourth best team in Spain and in with a reasonable chance of reaching the last 16 of the Europa League but it won’t be tolerated for long here, and the atmosphere was a testy one throughout. Xavi, so central to so much that makes Barca’s current plight all the more striking, will get a longer rope than most but patience is not inexhaustible even for a club legend like him.
They are what they are and that is an okayish side that lacks a bit of inspiration. That there is quite clearly a role for a journeyman like Luuk De Jong in this Barcelona squad despite the January upgrades is really quite damning.
Being in the Europa League is one thing, but the real worry for Barcelona should be that for all the initial strangeness of seeing that incongruous Europa logo on those shirts and around that stadium, by the end of the night it all made perfect sense. Right now, this is precisely where they belong.
