Barca spent this summer signing a Ballon d’Or midfielder, a Champions League winner and three attackers. Then pre-season ended, somebody added up the minutes, and the two players Hansi Flick had used more than anybody else turned out to be Marc Bernal, a pivot from Berga, and Xavi Espart, a full-back from Vilassar de Mar — both La Masia, neither of them signed for a euro.
According to a report by Mundo Deportivo, Bernal finished the friendlies on 250 minutes and Espart on 247 — the two most-used players in the whole squad. In a summer when Barca signed Rodri, Joao Cancelo, Anthony Gordon, Karim Adeyemi and Jesse Bisiwu, the two players Flick leaned on hardest both came out of La Masia. That is not an accident, and with the La Liga opener at Elche on Sunday it is worth taking seriously.
Why Marc Bernal and Espart got the minutes
Some of this is circumstance. MD describe a distinctly odd pre-season, thinned out by the World Cup diaspora, with Flick short of internationals for long stretches and free to spread the load. The numbers exclude the first friendly against CE Europa, which was played behind closed doors.
But circumstance only explains the opportunity, not what happened with it. Bernal, the midfielder from Berga, is the pure pivot in a midfield that has just added the most decorated holding player in Europe, and he still led the squad for game time. Espart, meanwhile, has been used at both full-back and in midfield — the versatility MD keep highlighting — and did enough that Flick was moved to compare him to Philipp Lahm, a line we covered when the comparison first landed. Praise like that has flattened plenty of academy graduates. It has not flattened this one.
The rest of the table
Behind the leading pair, two more names sit level on 241 minutes, and both tell you something about Sunday. Gerard Martin is now pointed towards a starting role as the left-sided centre-back, which fits what we saw in the Gamper when Jules Kounde moved inside and Eric Garcia took the right. And Hamza Abdelkarim was pre-season’s top scorer with four goals — the only recognised centre-forward in a squad still hunting a No 9 before 31 August.
Fifth on the list is Andreas Christensen, which MD flag with a special mention for the simplest of reasons: he got through it. The Dane’s Barca career has been repeatedly interrupted by injury, and a full pre-season without a setback is its own kind of result.
Among the new arrivals, Adeyemi got in earliest and played in every friendly. Bisiwu debuted in Udine, scored twice in Basel and came on late against Al Ahly. Gordon managed two appearances, in Switzerland and at the Gamper, having arrived already familiar with the manager’s philosophy, as he put it himself. Only Rodri and Cancelo, the last two through the door, are yet to play a minute in blaugrana.
What it means for Elche
Pre-season minutes are not a team sheet, and Flick has been explicit that his fitness programme this summer was deliberately heavy rather than a competitive audition. Rodri will not have to earn the No 6 shirt from Bernal, and Cancelo’s arrival narrows the left-back picture rather than widening it.
What the table does show is a manager who trusts the academy enough to hand it the heaviest workload in the building during the one period of the year when he can genuinely look at everybody. Barca have spent this window buying senior quality at the top of the market. They have also, quietly, spent it handing the two biggest workloads in the squad to a midfielder they have just tied down to 2031 and a full-back most Culers had barely seen in June.
Sunday at the Estadio Manuel Martinez Valero will be about the first team. But when Flick needs a pivot in October, or a full-back in a cup week in November, he already knows exactly what he has. That was rather the point of the summer.
