Barcelona’s Curious Week
Courts, Champions And A Familiar Feeling
This is a guest article by Chirag Sharatkumar. Subscribe to Sideline Stories.
On Sunday night in Jeddah, Barcelona won a Clasico to win a trophy. That’s it. That’s the headline, and it’s a good one. Five goals to two, five goals past Real Madrid, five moments of joy to bring a little light to a club so often shrouded in its own unpredictability, and Barcelona were Supercopa de Espana champions.
In the end, it was more than comfortable. Hansi Flick had won both his first title and his second Clasico at Barcelona by some margin, the final scoreline reading 5-2. It could have been more too, with 10-man Barcelona having to play a more restrained, but somehow equally imposing brand of football for the last 30 minutes of the match after Wojciech Szczesny got himself sent off for taking down Kylian Mbappe outside the box.
It started badly, of course. Mbappe scored just five minutes in, completely against the run of play, and for a moment, there was that familiar sinking feeling. Because this is Real Madrid in a final. Because this is what they do. Because you’ve seen this movie before, and you know how it ends. Except it didn’t. 17 minutes on from Mbappe’s opener, 17-year-old Lamine Yamal equalised, wriggling his way off the right through the Madrid defence before slipping the ball beyond reach the same way he came. Sound familiar, anyone?
Later, Robert Lewandowski gave Barca the lead via a penalty following Eduardo Camavinga’s clumsy tackle on Gavi, and three minutes later, Raphinha doubled the advantage, leaping up to nod home from Jules Kounde’s inch-perfect cross. Madrid’s rob-and-run tactic proved ineffective throughout the match, and Alejandro Balde added insult to injury when he and Raphinha executed it perfectly, that too against its recent originators, to add the fourth just before the break.
Raphinha added a fifth with a cool finish early into the second half and Barcelona, if they hadn’t already, had the game wrapped up. Szczesny’s sending off on the hour mark might have opened a door, however briefly, for Madrid to get back in the game, with Rodrygo thumping in a free-kick from just outside the box to rattle Inaki Pena in his first minute on the pitch.
But Barcelona slammed it shut. There was to be no illustrious Real Madrid comeback tonight. They switched quickly and impressively from incisive passes to a deep defence and the game was settled, as it had been long ago.
Flick’s Barcelona formally announced their arrival in October, when they put four past Madrid at the Santiago Bernabeu. Since then, they have endured a tough run in LaLiga, with three big home defeats to Las Palmas, Leganes, and Atletico Madrid. With just one win in their last seven matches, things had fallen apart. If October’s Clasico was Barcelona’s arrival, then Sunday’s game at King Abdullah Sports City — a stadium that shouldn’t have hosted this match to begin with — was their revival.
The year 2024 ended as poorly as possible for Flick and Co, with some tough draws and two of those three home defeats. But 2025 has started as well as they could have hoped, with three cup games delivering three comfortable wins; one in the Copa del Rey and two in the Supercopa, and now a trophy to boot too.
The joy was palpable. Barcelona beat Real Madrid in a frenzied Clasico final. Does it get any better?
But elsewhere, and notably some 5,000km elsewhere, back home in Spain where this game should have been played, there is another battle brewing for Barcelona to fight, as there always is. This time, though, it isn’t on the field and now, Madrid may not be making up the opposition.
After failing to comply with the league’s financial regulations with regard to their €462m salary limit, Barcelona suffered as Dani Olmo and Pau Victor, two players who were granted temporary registrations by the activation of Barcelona president Joan Laporta’s favorite “levers,” were immediately de-registered and removed from the squad.
Barcelona, as expected, appealed and failed and then appealed again, with the same result. The league and the Spanish football federation stood firm on their ruling, despite Barcelona insisting that a late €100m deal to sell VIP boxes at the now-under-renovation Camp Nou had been agreed to get them back in the green.
The league responded that proof of payment hadn’t arrived in time. And while Barca were back within their limits a few days into the year, league and federation rules do not allow the same player to be registered twice by the same club in a season.
Barcelona, now accustomed to being in the midst of these complications, took the case to the National Sports Council (CSD), a government body that effectively granted a provisional registration for Olmo and Victor while they investigated. This was done on the basis that the damages suffered by players, the league, and interestingly, the Spanish national team would be too great should they remain unregistered.
Naturally, this upset the crop at home. Valencia, Atletico de Madrid, Las Palmas, and Espanyol issued public statements opposing the CSD’s ruling, citing it an injustice while Athletic Bilbao, Sevilla, and Villarreal reportedly protested privately to LaLiga. The clubs complained and many of them would sue if they could, but complaints are all they can manage at the moment.
Real Madrid, intriguingly, have stayed conspicuously quiet. They say, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” and Florentino Perez might just have shared a similar sentiment with Laporta as they sat atop the Director’s Box at King Abdullah Sports City, where Laporta’s mismanaged Barcelona decimated Perez’s mechanical Madrid.
Perez, always the pragmatist, seems to have decided that this battle isn’t worth fighting, reportedly to keep Laporta close for the sake of his diabolical Super League project. Perhaps he has decided not to launch a complaint, or perhaps he believes that, in the end, Barcelona’s problems will catch up to them, regardless of any external action.
Whether the CSD is forced to renege on their ruling, either by persistence from the league or the clubs, or whether Barcelona manage to live to fight another financial day is anyone’s guess. But the fight will go on. The league, the cups, and of course, the courtrooms. This is their reality now: every victory on the pitch accompanied by a battle off it. Every step forward followed by the nagging fear that the ground beneath them could give way.
For now, though, they had won. On Sunday night, as the team, Olmo and Victor included, lifted the trophy high up towards the Arabian night sky, Laporta joined them on the pitch.
The headlines were written, the regular script torn up, and the trophy theirs. For one brief moment, Barcelona could celebrate.
They could breathe. After all, they had earned that much.