If anyone is surprised FC Barcelona coach Hansi Flick has arrived and put Barca at the top of La Liga, in the final 16 of the Champions League, and the semifinals of the Copa del Rey you shouldn´t be. In the past few years, the hierarchy of the club has proven to be disastrous with transfers (Pjanic, Braithwaite, Griezmann, Coutinho, Dembele), along with the managerial choice of Xavi, but in Flick Barca have changed their ways and finally made a good choice. Let´s take a look at why.
He played 104 times for Bayern Munich, winning four Bundesliga titles, one Super Cup, and a DFB Pokal with Bayern Munich before moving on to FC Koln and retiring in 1993 due to injuries. He started his managerial career in the German 4th Division, at Victoria Bammental and later TSG1989 Hoffenheim, who he led to promotion, and would move onto the German National Team, assisting Jochim Low for 8 years and winning the World Cup in 2014. He would later return to Bayern Munich as an assistant and when Nico Kovak was sacked in 2019, he took over on an intern role. And this is when the story really begins.
In less than 2 seasons at the helm of Bayern he lost only 7 games and won 7 major trophies, including a sextuple (yes 6 trophies in one year), and became the only coach to lead his team to Champions League glory without losing a single match. At one point he won 23 consecutive matches, a German league record, and won the 2020 European Coach of the Year award.
In his short time at FC Barcelona, he has revolutionized their style of play, making them a much more pragmatic attacking team and implementing a high-risk defensive system that has proven to be successful. Look at Rafinha. A year ago, he couldn´t get a full match under Xavi, and he certainly wasn´t producing any type of consistent numbers. Under Flick he´s sitting on 13 goals and 6 assists, and at times is even wearing the captain’s armband. Flick has also been able to take a 36-year-old Robert Lewandowski and make him look 26, with 20 goals so far this season. It´s a matter of man management and being able to get the most out of the players at his disposal, something Xavi severely lacked.
There´s still a lot of football to be played, but at the moment it´s looking more than possible that Flick could be up to the same tricks he showed at Bayern Munich, with a treble in his first season in charge.