Thirteen minutes into Barcelona’s first league game of the season, Raphinha dropped a shoulder, cut inside Víctor Chust and felt the Elche defender catch his standing foot. He picked the ball up himself, waited, and drilled it left-footed inside Dituro’s left-hand post. Then, once his team-mates had finished with him, the Brazilian pressed two fingers into his palm and shot a web at the Martínez Valero night sky. The Raphinha Spiderman celebration lasted about two seconds, and it has been read ever since as something rather bigger than a goal celebration.
Because there is only one Spider-Man in Spanish football this summer. La Araña is Julián Álvarez — the Atlético Madrid striker Barcelona have chased all window, and who, a few hours earlier on the same Sunday, had been loudly whistled by his own supporters at the Metropolitano. Mundo Deportivo put the question in its headline rather than the answer: a wink to Álvarez? Neither Raphinha nor the club has said.
The Raphinha Spiderman celebration capped a captain’s first competitive night
Whatever the gesture meant, the goal itself carried weight. This was Raphinha’s first competitive match wearing the armband, after Hansi Flick provisionally named him first captain, with the squad’s captaincy vote deferred until the window closes. He marked it inside a quarter of an hour, from a penalty he won himself.
He also did it from a position he is not supposed to be playing. With no recognised No 9 signed and Hamza Abdelkarim left out of the starting line-up, Mundo Deportivo’s Roger Torelló describes Flick using Raphinha as the central reference in attack, with Lamine Yamal to his right and Karim Adeyemi to his left. Barça Universal’s pre-match reading of the same XI had Adeyemi as the false nine, which tells you how fluid the front three was meant to be. Either way, the Blaugrana’s opening goal of the league season came from a winger filling a hole the club has spent all summer trying to buy its way out of.
The armband suits him. We wrote up Raphinha’s first captain’s speech at the Joan Gamper Trophy, when he paid tribute to the injured Roony Bardghji and welcomed the new signings. This was the follow-up: less ceremony, more penalty.
The Álvarez subplot nobody can ignore
The timing is what makes the celebration land. Earlier on Sunday, before Atlético’s game with Villarreal, Álvarez’s name was read over the PA and a section of the Metropolitano booed it. He was on the bench, and he looked at the floor while it happened. President Enrique Cerezo had already accused Barcelona of failing to rise to the occasion in their pursuit of him. We covered all of it in our report on the booing and Cerezo’s comments.
So when a Barça captain scores the club’s first league goal of the campaign in the No 9 role Barça want Álvarez to fill, and celebrates it by doing the Argentine’s trademark celebration, it is difficult to file under coincidence. It is also, to be fair to Raphinha, entirely deniable. Spider-Man celebrations are not exactly rare.
What can be said without guessing: Mundo Deportivo, who were at the ground, framed it as a possible nod. The gesture came on the day the striker Barça want was booed by his own crowd. And Atlético’s executives had spent the afternoon telling anyone who asked that he is not for sale.
A better start than last season
There is a straightforward football story underneath all this too. Torelló notes that Raphinha’s previous campaign was conditioned by injuries; opening the new one with a goal inside 15 minutes, as captain, in an unfamiliar central role, is about as clean a reset as he could have written for himself.
Barça are back in action on Thursday, when the rearranged fixture against Athletic Club is played at the Spotify Camp Nou — Barcelona’s first home league game of the season. Whether Raphinha is still leading the line by then depends on a striker signing that Deco has promised and nobody has yet delivered. Follow the live detail from Elche in Mundo Deportivo’s match blog.
