Barcelona's big-game problem isn't the attack
Barcelona have scored five or more goals in seven of their 14 games this season: 7-2 against Racing Santander, 6-1 against Alavés, and five each against Elche, Rayo Vallecano, Valencia, Feyenoord and Real Betis. Then, in the space of five days in October, they lost 4-2 at PSG and 2-1 at home to Real Madrid.
That pattern gets a familiar explanation: Barcelona bully small teams and fold when the opponent is good. I wanted to test it properly rather than from memory, so I took every competitive game under Hansi Flick, 131 of them from August 2024 to last Saturday, and split them by how good the opponent was.
The short version: the explanation is half right. Barcelona's attack turns up for big games. Their defence does not.
How I split the games
The split uses Opta's Power Rankings, which rate every club in the world on one scale. Barcelona are fourth. Ten of the clubs in the current top 20 have played Barcelona under Flick: Bayern München, Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid, Chelsea, Inter, Atlético Madrid, Benfica, Borussia Dortmund, Club Brugge and Newcastle United. That gives 34 games against the top 20 and 97 against everyone else.
The rankings are today's, applied to games going back to 2024, so a club like Atalanta (third in Serie A in 2025, outside the top 20 now) counts as "everyone else". I checked whether that choice drives the result. It does not (see the last section).