After a couple of months absorbing the concussive style of football that has defined the Premier League’s 2025-2026 season, watching Real Madrid’s 2-1 win against Barcelona was a weird experience.
There are no long throws. Even corners and free-kicks in the opposing half are often taken short rather than swung in on top of the keeper. The players awaiting the delivery in the middle behave weirdly too. They are conspicuously just standing around waiting, rather than moving with hostile intent in complex choreographed patterns. Nobody is blocking or crowding. Nobody has the goalkeeper in an armlock.
Real Madrid did actually hire their first ever set-piece coach a few weeks ago, but based on this showing we are still waiting to see the impact of Jesús Rueda’s work.
The casual way Madrid treated their many set-piece opportunities was even more remarkable given they were facing a Barcelona team where Marcus Rashford was the only outfield player over 6ft tall. It’s difficult to imagine either of Barcelona’s centre-backs, Pau Cubarsi and Erik Garcia, being taken seriously as defenders in the Premier League (Garcia failed at Manchester City before becoming Barcelona’s starting centre-back). Imagine these guys trying to defend a Michael Kayode long throw against Nathan Collins and Kristoffer Ajer.
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The football authorities’ mania for inventing matches has yet to bring us a competitive game between Brentford and Barcelona, but it would be interesting to see. Maybe the closest we have seen was when Barcelona played Newcastle in the Champions League last month. Obviously Eddie Howe tried to bludgeon them with the usual Premier League formula of frenzied pressing, set-pieces and fast breaks. It didn’t work: Barcelona won 2-1.
Barca’s double-pivot in midfield that night consisted of Frenkie de Jong and Pedri, who is two centimetres shorter than Florian Wirtz. On Saturday evening at Brentford, towards the end of yet another game spent watching balls fly over his head, Wirtz was subbed off with the home fans chanting “What a waste of money”. The current consensus is that including Wirtz in midfield makes Liverpool impossibly flimsy and lightweight. In Spain a player with that kind of physique can still be the fundamental player in midfield.
“I think the way they keep the ball was a learning experience,” Anthony Gordon said afterwards. “We don’t play against that kind of style in England, not at that level anyway, I thought they were the best I’ve played against in that sense of the game… We got the goal which is testament to our mentality. We were knackered.”
On the night Newcastle just couldn’t get close to Barcelona, whose way of playing looked – aside from any consideration of style and taste – much more energy-efficient. It remains to be seen if the hard physical football we have been seeing in the Premier League can be sustained through the more intense fixture schedule of the winter months. You can’t expect to fight endless duels and not pick up a few injuries.
De Jong and Pedri were again the double-pivot against Madrid, whose coach Xabi Alonso took a different approach from Howe. Besides that oddly Corinthian approach to set-pieces, Madrid played four in central midfield and did not waste energy chasing Barcelona in their own half. Instead Alonso’s team seemed happy to lure them forward, then attack the space in behind with the pace of Kylian Mbappé and Vinicius jnr.
The game plan worked, largely thanks to the clinical finishing of Mbappé, who is a player transformed since this time last year, when he was called offside eight times as Madrid lost the same fixture 4-0. He is fit, focused and clearly enjoying the responsibility of being the star the team is built around.
He was unlucky that a phenomenal early goal from a 30-yard shot was disallowed for a fractional offside, but scored clinically when put through by Bellingham a few minutes later, and made Barcelona feel throughout as though their aggressive offside line – their main defensive weapon – was actually a liability.
As Mbappé has grown into the team’s dominant player, Vini jnr’s position has become correspondingly less secure. His desperation to score was evident in a couple of greedy decisions and he reacted sourly to being substituted in the second half. He did at least contribute to what turned out to be the winning goal, accelerating past two down the left before a deep cross beyond the back post was headed back across for Jude Bellingham to tap in.
The subdued and ineffective Lamine Yamal was whistled and abused constantly after a week in which he had unwisely chosen to goad the Madrid fans, suggesting their club specialised in “robbing and complaining”. Dani Carvajal made sure to remind him of this at the end of the game, and his taunting of Yamal set off a confrontation between the teams.
De Jong rebuked Carvajal after the game, arguing that if he had a problem with something Yamal had said, he should have called him privately to straighten things out. It’s surprising that, even as a vastly experienced player of 28, De Jong appears not to realise that the public humiliation is the whole point.
The menace of Yamal has helped Alonso to put his stamp on Madrid, as though their players realise that against a genius like this they have no choice but to organise.
Barcelona’s reliance on Yamal continues to grow even as his form has stagnated a little. But Hansi Flick’s side have more immediate problems than the possible burnout of their young star.
They got knocked out by a much weaker Inter in last season’s Champions League semi-final essentially because they couldn’t defend corners. That weakness now seems more relevant than ever, but – maybe because La Liga teams are less likely to target them in this way – they have done nothing to address it. Even a fully-fit Yamal might struggle to make up for that.
