Hans-Dieter Flick

We got Tommy who is pretty great and is being firmly groomed as the midfielder from the B with first team potential right now.

We will know alot more about him from pre-season as B will be beneath him come 26/27 season. But clearly right now competing on three fronts still, Flick can't drop him in the mix.

Every football person has commented how the high line and this type of defending is a liability and we are still debating here in Barcaforum.
It's a suicide defensive strategy, even with top defenders, a strong midfield and highly pressing atacking line.
We have a mediocre defense that gets changed every 4-5 games.
We have no DM at all and when Pedri is missing, which is quite often, no actual mid control.
We have Lewa that cannot press and Yamal who is half assing it.
No boxes are ticked and we still stick to a plan that has backfired so many times in all competitions.
Now that our attacking output has not been great, it shows badly.

jamrock said:

Definitely a DM we can find in France or Brazil for 20-40m who can do the job, until we see what bernal has.

Just need some scouting

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I like Atalanta's Ederson, I think we were linked to him a while back. But Eric can do the job and hopefully Tommy later on. But we don't really need to play with a DM in LL and Camp Nou, just more difficult away games imo.

JohnN said:

Every football person has commented how the high line and this type of defending is a liability and we are still debating here in Barcaforum.
It's a suicide defensive strategy, even with top defenders, a strong midfield and highly pressing atacking line.
We have a mediocre defense that gets changed every 4-5 games.
We have no DM at all and when Pedri is missing, which is quite often, no actual mid control.
We have Lewa that cannot press and Yamal who is half assing it.
No boxes are ticked and we still stick to a plan that has backfired so many times in all competitions.
Now that our attacking output has not been great, it shows badly.

Click to expand...

It is all assumed, and it worked last season. It is starting to backfire badly this season, obviously, but now we need to see the manager's reaction to this. Nothing more to it than that.

It is not THAT unlikely that seeing us lose more and more, by big margins vs good teams, Flick will adjust some things and make some compromises, as idealist and stubborn as he is. We'll see.

serghei trying to position himself as both a flick supporter and criticaster so will always be right in the end

In my opinion the situation did not change dramatically comparing to last season. The difference is our attackers waste TOOOO….many chances to counterbalance our bad defending, except the match against Atletico M. If we could have scored at least half of created chances, we should have been fine.
Not mentioning that referees/ VAR are clearly against us all over the place and favour Real Madrid big time. Any result influenced by a helpful referee will turn everything upside down. One example, the Real Madrid penalty got very easy with Rayo Vallecano in the last minute of that game, last attack.
If that match would end up tie - as normally should had - we would still be on 1st place in LL. And examples can continue like that.
Do not forget that in any match, the referee CAN make a huge difference between a win and loss. To me, this is the biggest concern to date.

We had 51 points last season at this stage. We have 58 now. Same amount of goals scored and conceded.

On top of an already paper thin squad, this season Pedri and Raphinha both barely played 50 % of all available minutes. I think we all agree they are 2 of our top 3 players alongside Lamine.

Overall, our results are better in worse circumstances. In some individual big games, teams are naturally better prepared for our setup now. Offside trap is no surprise anymore. We were also never going to keep 5-2ing and 4-0ing RM 10 times in a row.

Defense was already shit last season. We conceded 7 against Inter over 2 legs, lost 1-3 to Dortmund, even conceded 3 against a catastrophic RM last season. It's our defensive level, unless we drastically start playing park-the-bus football under such a coach.

There is no coach coming and improving on this with this squad. RM have Mbappe, Bayern have Kane, City have Haaland. We have Ferran Torres and a nearly 40 year old with grey hair. When last season's CL top scorer gets injured, we play a ManU reject or Roony. Our starting CB is an 18 year old who barely has hair on his balls.

Last 2 results and performances were shit on a stick but overall we are still overachieving. This squad has no business playing 90+ La Liga points and reaching CL semis unless it's an easy path. There are half a dozen better or equally talented squads out there.