Top 10 ranked
©IMAGO
Real Madrid face a real conundrum this weekend in LaLiga. If “Los Blancos” fail to pick up all three points on their trip to Espanyol on Sunday, and Barcelona do win their league clash with Osasuna, the Catalan giants will be crowned Spanish champions of the 2025/26 season. If Real Madrid can delay that by a further week, they risk Barcelona being crowned champions when the two LaLiga giants lock horns in El Clásico on the following matchday. Kylian Mbappé & Co. are damned if they do. And damned if they don’t.
That, of course, won’t matter much to Hansi Flick and his team. Whether they win the title this weekend or next weekend, it’ll still be considered another impressive league campaign for the club under their German tactician. Remarkably, when Barcelona do win the league, it’ll mean that Flick has not only won two out of two leagues with the Spanish giants, but will also hold the enviable record of having a 100% success rate in league football, having won both of his league titles as Bayern Munich manager. Few could doubt that Flick is doing an admirable job as Barcelona manager. But how does he compare to his predecessors in the role?
When we tally up the points-per-game averages of Barcelona’s last 10 managers and plot them alongside one another, we get a graph like the one above. And, immediately, we can see that Flick has undoubtedly returned Barcelona to their ideal spot at the top of Spanish football. Not only is Flick’s average of 2.37 points per game a 15% increase on his immediate predecessor’s, with Xavi averaging just 2.07 points per game, but he also enjoys a 21% improvement on Ronald Koeman’s average of 1.96 points per game.
In fact, as we can see from the table, only two former Barcelona managers can lay claim to a better record than Flick. The most recent was the fantastic Luis Enrique, who averaged 2.41 points per game during his three-year tenure at Barcelona, when he won two league titles, three Spanish Cups and the all-important Champions League. In contrast to that incredible record, Flick still has some work to do. The other manager who still sits above Flick is the late Tito Vilanova, who averaged 2.49 points per game during his 44 games in charge.
Curiously, Flick’s current form has him just 0.01 points per game above Pep Guardiola, who many consider to be Barcelona’s greatest ever manager. However, Guardiola coached in over twice as many games as Flick’s current tally of 112 games and, crucially, won three league titles and two Champions Leagues. And while Flick can’t be faulted for his success in LaLiga to date, he still has some way to go before he can rival Guardiola or indeed Enrique in Europe.
