Barcelona captain Raphinha has been named La Liga’s Player of the Month for August, and it was not even the only award to land on his desk on Friday. Hours earlier, UEFA had picked the Brazilian in their Champions League Team of the Week for the opening round of the league phase. A double recognition, then — and a pointed one, in a week when his name was missing from a rather more famous list.
Raphinha Player of the Month: the numbers behind the award
The 29-year-old won La Liga’s monthly prize ahead of Jude Bellingham, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Alex Baena and Nahuel Tenaglia, and the voting can hardly have detained anybody long. Raphinha opened the season with two goals and an assist away at Elche, scored again against Athletic Club, and then helped himself to a brace against Rayo Vallecano — five league goals in the Blaugrana’s first three matches of the campaign.
He has not stopped since. A goal in the 5-0 win at Valencia took him to six in four La Liga outings, making him only the second player this century to reach that mark in the opening four games of a season. The first, inevitably, was Lionel Messi.
Add the two he scored in the midweek demolition of Feyenoord and the tally reads eight goals in five games across all competitions. Per data cited by Mundo Deportivo, only Sandor Kocsis in 1958/59 has scored more in Barcelona’s first five official fixtures of a season, with nine. Raphinha is also the first Barça player to score in each of the opening five matches since Luis Suárez — the 1960 Ballon d’Or winner — in that same 1958/59 campaign.
UEFA’s verdict on the Feyenoord performance
The second honour came from UEFA’s technical observers, who named Raphinha in their Team of the Week after Matchday 1. Their assessment, published on UEFA’s website and reported by Mundo Deportivo, praised him for leading the press with impressive intensity, making runs in behind the defence to create danger from deep and playing between the lines, before finishing the night with two excellent goals.
The first of those is the one supporters will keep. Under a storm at the Spotify Camp Nou, Raphinha shaped to shoot and sent both St. Juste and Vanhoutte sliding off the wet turf before rolling the ball home — a piece of skill Catalan reporters immediately filed alongside Messi’s famous finish past Jerome Boateng at the same end of the ground.
He was picked in that side alongside three former Barcelona players: Sergiño Dest, now at PSV, Marc Bartra, who scored twice for Real Betis in Stuttgart, and Ferran Torres, who marked his Paris Saint-Germain European debut with a hat-trick against Slovan Bratislava.
The false nine nobody planned for
What makes the run stranger still is that Raphinha is not playing in his own position. Hansi Flick has been using the captain as a central striker — a false nine, in practice — and the role has unlocked a side of his game that seven years as a winger never quite did. He drifts between the centre-backs, attacks the space behind them, and still carries out the pressing work that made him a Flick favourite in the first place.
That solution was born out of necessity. Barcelona’s pursuit of Julián Álvarez collapsed on deadline day and the club turned instead to Gabriel Jesus, who arrived from Arsenal to take the No. 9 shirt. A month on, the emergency answer looks like the better one. Raphinha has scored the opening goal in four of his five matches, the sort of detail that separates a genuinely decisive forward from one padding his numbers in a rout.
A consolation, and a contract
The timing is not accidental. Both awards arrived in the same week that the 30-man Ballon d’Or shortlist was published without Raphinha or Pedri on it — an omission that caused genuine anger in Catalonia, given Raphinha finished among the leading candidates last season.
His own response, after collecting the man of the match award against Feyenoord, was characteristically flat: “I don’t talk about that, I talk about Barcelona. We’re having a spectacular season.”
The club, meanwhile, are moving to reward the form in the only currency that really counts. Barcelona have begun work on a new contract for their captain, and the player is said to be keen to sign. On this evidence, it is difficult to see anybody at the Camp Nou arguing about the terms.
Sources: Mundo Deportivo, Barca Blaugranes, Barça Universal.
