Before Hansi Flick had given Xavi Espart a single minute of first-team football, he handed him a comparison that would flatten most teenagers. Philipp Lahm. Not a similar player, not a similar profile — Lahm, the man who captained Bayern Munich from right-back and from central midfield, and Germany too. That was the name Flick reached for when asked about a 19-year-old from Barcelona’s academy who had yet to make his debut.
Six months on, Espart has spent an entire pre-season making the comparison look less absurd than it had any right to. He started the Joan Gamper Trophy on Wednesday night, in midfield, in a Barça side that beat Al Ahly 2-1 at the Spotify Camp Nou — and he was one of the better players on the pitch.
The numbers behind the hype
Espart’s first-team career is still tiny: three minutes at Newcastle in March on debut, and 190 minutes across six appearances in total. But the trajectory is steep. Mundo Deportivo make the point that he has effectively jumped the queue ahead of Héctor Fort, who by age, experience and squad seniority might have expected the next turn at right-back — and who is now expected to find minutes elsewhere despite holding the No. 12 shirt.
What has caught the eye is not athleticism, which is the usual academy calling card. It is decision-making. Mundo Deportivo single out three things: carrying the ball out of defence and breaking lines with it, one-twos with Fermín López in tight spaces, and a genuine range of forward passing — inside the full-back, outside the centre-back, and repeatedly into Karim Adeyemi’s stride. Those are the things, they note pointedly, that Jules Koundé has produced only in flashes from that side of the pitch.
Flick’s La Masia habit is not a gesture
Espart was not the only academy player on show. At the squad presentation, Flick sent the whole La Masia contingent onto the pitch as a group — Espart, Brian Fariñas, Álvaro Cortés, Ebrima Tunkara and Orian Goren — and then, crucially, played several of them.
Fariñas came on as a central midfielder and finished the match at right-back, a switch Flick had already trialled in training. Cortés looked like exactly what Barça need him to be, a calm centre-back. Goren showed flashes. Jordi Pesquer got down the left. And Hamza Abdelkarim, currently the only pure No. 9 on the books, scored his fourth goal of pre-season with a proper centre-forward’s finish — the same teenager who would not celebrate against his old club.
The pattern matters. Flick has never used academy minutes as a public-relations exercise, and the club’s recruitment this summer — Anthony Gordon, Adeyemi, Rodri, Jesse Bisiwu — has not changed his instinct to look downstairs first when he needs a solution.
Where Espart actually fits
Here is the complication. Flick has just handed the right-back shirt to Eric Garcia, having told him he wants to use him there this season, with Koundé moving inside to centre-back. That is the senior pecking order, and Espart is not going to displace it in August.
But it is also why the Gamper detail is interesting: Espart started in midfield, not at full-back. Two positions, one squad number away from a first-team place, in a season with LaLiga, the Champions League and the cups to get through. Bisiwu, by contrast, was presented as a Barça Atlètic player in the 27 — a reminder that not every young arrival gets fast-tracked.
José María García used to insist that flattery weakens a player. Xavi Espart has spent a summer quietly proving the exception. Elche away on Sunday night is unlikely to be his moment. Somewhere in the ten months after it, on this evidence, one of them will be.
