This weekend we witnessed a strong performance from Barcelona against Osasuna with a 4-0 win. It has been a while, but the Catalan giants were a pleasure to watch in a La Liga fixture. Griezmann scoring a fantastic volley was the highlight of the match, however, Messi’s goal celebration dedicated to the late Diego Maradona touched the hearts of football fans from around the world. Barcelona totally dominated, having 72% of ball possession and shooting 20 times. In the following visualisation we can see Barcelona’s passing network from the match. Bigger circles represent more passes by a player and a thicker line represents more passes between the two players it connects.

There are some interesting patterns to see in this passing network. We will start from the back were we can see that Mingueza had more passes than Lenglet which is because Lenglet injured himself and had to be substituted. Lenglet mostly distributed the ball to Alba and De Jong and that triangle had the most passes between them. Alba and De Jong had 46 passes between them while De Jong had 94 accurate passes in the match. It is really interesting to see the average positions of Lenglet, De Jong and Coutinho who occupy the same line but with different depth. Coutinho clearly ordinated in the left half-space cooperating mostly with Alba who played wider. On the right side, we can see that Messi was even closer to the centre of the pitch than Coutinho. Messi’s average position was close to Griezmann and Braithwaite whose positions almost overlap. That trio was responsible for the attacks through the middle. We can see that Pedri was close to Griezmann for link-up play, but he was subbed off at half-time.

Conclusion

Barcelona have now dominated two games in a row with convincing victories. Even though their opponents weren’t top tier clubs, these victories showed some improvements in the overall performances. They showed that they still have one of the finest attacks in the world, but their defence will face troubles after Lenglet’s injury as well as Pique and Umtiti carrying existing injuries that will keep them sidelined. Finally, in this formation De Jong can continue his development while playing as “6” because he stagnated in a 4-3-3 last season while playing mostly as “8”. He was the main distributor of the ball and dictated the tempo of the match.