Cesc Fabregas has never been shy about saying what he thinks, and the verdict of Fabregas on Barcelona this week is not a complicated one. Watching his old club take Feyenoord apart on Wednesday, the Como coach reached for the same word twice: frightening.
Fabregas on Barcelona: ‘they find solutions everywhere’
Fabregas had just overseen the best night in Como’s modern history — a 4-1 win over RB Leipzig at the Giuseppe Sinigaglia on their first appearance in the Champions League — when he was asked about the Blaugrana. He had watched the 5-1 the evening before, and he was not in the mood to hedge.
“Yesterday I watched the Barça game and I have to say, Feyenoord is a very good team, but Barça makes you look bad because they find solutions at every moment,” he told Movistar, in comments relayed by Barca Blaugranes. “You can defend them man-to-man, like they tried with Rodri or Pedri, but they find solutions everywhere. Whoever plays, they’re at a very high level. It’s scary, the level they’re playing at right now is frightening.”
The detail that matters there is the man-marking. Feyenoord went after Barcelona’s two deepest creators specifically, and it bought them nothing; the ball simply went somewhere else. That is the part Fabregas, a coach who spends his week trying to build pressing traps of his own, clearly could not get past.
The numbers behind the compliment
He is not talking in vibes. Barcelona have won all five of their matches this season and scored 22 goals doing it, a rate of 4.4 per game and the sort of start the club had not managed since 1950. The 17 goals from the first four La Liga rounds are the third-best opening in the club’s history in the competition.
Set against the rest of the continent, per Mundo Deportivo, it is not close: Bayern Munich have 16 in five games in all competitions, Chelsea 14 in four. As Barca Universal point out, the goals of Raphinha (8), Lamine Yamal (5) and Fermin Lopez (4) on their own would be enough to beat most of Europe’s heavyweights outright.
Fabregas is also not the only voice from outside the building saying it this week. Jamie Carragher used his platform to argue that Barcelona are going about Europe on their own terms,, while Hansi Flick himself has spent the week insisting his side still have levels to find.
And then there is January
There is a punchline to all of this, and Fabregas knows it. The league phase draw has paired Como with Barcelona, which means the man who left La Masia for Arsenal at 16, came back in 2011 and won a treble in Catalonia will bring his own team to the Spotify Camp Nou in the new year. Two clubs at opposite ends of European football’s food chain, one of them managed by someone who has just told the world how frightened everybody should be.
Como’s own start suggests the reunion will not be a stroll. Fabregas has assembled a side that beat Leipzig 4-1 on debut in the competition, playing with a front-foot aggression that looks a lot like the football he used to receive the ball in. Whether that is the right approach to take to a team scoring four and a half goals a game is a question he has roughly four months to answer.
For now, the compliment stands on its own. Barcelona have played five matches this season and the most interesting scouting report on them has come from a coach who watched on television, saw a team being man-marked out of its two best passers, and concluded that it made no difference whatsoever.
