Results over beauty, not a bad trade-off

Football history was created on Saturday night, when Barcelona beat a small, Madrid-based club called Rayo Vallecano in the Spanish league. The scoreline, 4-0 in Barcelona’s favour, did not matter. What did was Barcelona’s share in ball possession slumping to 46%, ceding the remainder to their rivals. For anyone familiar with the game, this is unthinkable. Barcelona have dominated possession in their last 317 consecutive matches, against rivals like Real Madrid, Manchester United and Bayern Munich. This is the first time since 2008 that this number slid below 50% for Barcelona.

Why has this happened? The team has a new coach, Gerardo Martino, who is modifying its traditional short passing, tiki-taka game. In the recent past, Barcelona were hogging the ball, not scoring. This culminated in last season’s Champions League, when it was bundled out by Bayern after a resounding 7-0 loss. Martino’s plan, likely, is to play effective attacking football that gets the goals, rather than tiring out the team with relentless passing. Martino’s Barca plays a game that is less pleasing to the eye than the neat triangles wrought by earlier coaches, but he gets more bang for the buck: Barca is scoring like it hasn’t done in some time. Martino has traded off some beauty for better results, not a bad bargain after last season’s disappointments.