In the end, Barcelona were just too good and Madrid just not good enough: not only here, in the clasico that in effect clinched the league title, but all season long. Hansi Flick’s young team have been wild and fun, and they are going to be double winners, La Liga secured the way they played all year.
Montjuïc briefly held its breath and then celebrated in the sunshine as the Barça fans watched their side concede two inside 15 minutes, seemingly inviting a catastrophe, and still win a chaotic match that would not have been out of place on a playground. Kylian Mbappé scored a hat-trick but Barcelona scored more – which is what they do.
Four times this season Barcelona have faced their rivals and four times they have beaten them, scoring 16. The first set up the league season, the second won the Super Cup, the third took the Copa del Rey and the last, another portrait of the campaign for both sides, took Barcelona seven points clear with three games to play. It finished 4-3, and that was with all the chances missed – there were more than 30 shots and four goals were ruled out.
Barcelona trailed early, but goals from Eric García, Lamine Yamal and two for Raphinha enabled them to do it again, any ghosts from their European exit gone on another fearless afternoon where the only strange thing was Madrid were ever in it – let alone within a goal of it until the end, some slight hold still on the title race.
Fearless for some of them anyway – Flick admitting he had suffered and would have to check his heart rate. By then, though, he was smiling, saying how proud he was of his players and their personality.
It had felt like much of this game might be decided in the mind, psychology central to the way it played out. And if Barcelona were vulnerable having returned defeated from Milan, they could not have started worse. They were not even three minutes in when Pau Cubarsí and Szczesny gifted the penalty from which Mbappé gave Madrid the lead. But this is a different Barcelona, even when they fell further behind after Vinícius Júnior bent a pass into Mbappé with the outside of his foot, setting the Frenchman up for a smooth finish.
Barcelona had actually played well until then, forcing their rivals ever deeper. Thibaut Courtois had denied García, Ferran Torres had almost scurried clear and Dani Olmo might have done better. But now, their entire world might have crumbled around them, two moments leaving them on the floor. Only that is when this Barcelona team get up again, and do it all over. What followed was a dominance so complete you could be forgiven for thinking they had given their opponents a two-goal lead just for the fun of it, a storm unleashed.
This was the season in 90 minutes, or 30 of them. Barcelona were superb, Madrid mostly a shambles, overrun. No, there was no certainty that the goals would come but when four of them did before half-time it felt like the most logical thing in the world.
Time and again, Barcelona ambushed their opponents, especially on the left – repeatedly they ran beyond them. It was all Madrid could do to kick the ball as far away as possible and most of the time even that was beyond them. It started with García heading in from Barça’s seventh corner in the opening 19 minutes. Next Pedri and Torres set up Lamine Yamal to curl in a lovely and increasingly familiar equaliser, that Lamine shot going right into the far corner. Then Mbappé and Dani Ceballos bumped into each other in a moment that could have come to the sound of a kazoo or the crash of cymbals but instead brought with a roar, Pedri recovering and releasing for Raphinha to steer past Courtois. And finally, poor Lucas Vázquez was hunted down again, Raphinha taking it off him and exchanging passes with Torres to score.
A fifth from Lamine Yamal was ruled out for offside, although with 20 minutes to go Luka Modric set Vinícius running through into space to set up Mbappé for his hat-trick.
There was something about the goal that didn’t make sense, even if the game had got a bit silly and so, so open. Until then, Barcelona had been enjoying this, creating more chances, and rather than clinging to the hope of a comeback Madrid might have just wished it would end: the game, the season, the whole sorry thing. But now perhaps, with the shot count at 16-4 and the score 4-3, there was something to chase. A wildness begun, too. In the last minute Victor Muñoz, a Madrid B‑teamer playing his first minutes, missed a glorious chance.
Yet Barcelona had made more chances, did more to make this fun, and should have got more. Raphinha certainly could. Courtois and the VAR denied them and there were chances all over the place, as well as a penalty shout turned down for an Aurélien Tchouaméni handball before Fermín López got a late fifth – only for that to be ruled out too. Four would do for a fourth clasico win and league title. Life has been good lived on the edge.
