Barcelona won their most recent La Liga match against Villarreal and maintained the four point advantage over Real Madrid. The victory against the yellow submarine was the 8th in a row for Los Culés, something that was very complicated to accomplish a couple of months ago.
The season was heavily disrupted by a wave of major injuries in its early stages, and Real Madrid wasted no time capitalizing on that disruption. The merengues asserted their dominance in El Clásico, while Barça walked away from the encounter with more uncertainty than clarity, left searching for answers after a night that exposed just how costly their setbacks had become.
Weeks later, Barcelona started recovering key players, then went back to the new Camp Nou and for moments, you were able to see the type of brilliant football Hansi Flick wants his team to play.
The 3–3 draw in Belgium against Club Brugge and the defeat to Chelsea at Stamford Bridge cannot be overlooked, but there is no denying that he has helped restore the team’s spirit. Following the loss to the Blues in London, the German manager promised that a better version of Barcelona would emerge.
Indeed, the team changed its spirit and now looks like a whole new squad, but they'll need more than a change of mentality to achieve glory at the end of the season.
First, they need a new central defender. It’s obvious the culés need a new defender after the recent injury of Andreas Christensen and Ronald Araujo’s mental health issues. For example, names like Tomás Araújo and Nicolás Otamendi (Benfica), Axel Disasi (Chelsea), João Cancelo (Al-Hilal) and Marcos Senesi (Bournemouth) have appeared recently on their list, but Deco and Barcelona will have the last word on this possible transfer move.
Secondly, Barcelona will need a healthy squad for the upcoming months. After the multiple injuries in the beginning of the season, Hansi Flick will have to look more often to the bench to take care of key players ahead of the toughest weeks of the campaign.
Finally, Barça will need to be mature when the decisive moments of the season arrives. That means, no distractions and administrate better the pace and rhythm of key matches. We all know what happened in the UEFA Champions League semifinals against Inter Milan. The lack of concentration and maturity of some players cost Barcelona to reach the European final.
With that being said, Barcelona have the keys of success on their own hands and their first major test of the season is next week. The culés will travel to Saudi Arabia to play the Spanish Super Cup semifinal against Athletic Club and if they prevail, they will face the winner of the other semifinal between Atletico Madrid and Real Madrid.
Surely, time will tell if this team will be able to use these keys appropriately in order to reach glory at the end of the campaign.