Wojciech Szczesny returns to the Estadio da Luz on Wednesday — the place where, only five weeks ago, his short Barcelona career must have flashed before his eyes.
His first Champions League start of the season, in a league phase meeting with Benfica in January, was at risk of being defined by an atrocious attempt at sweeping up a pass played in-behind Barcelona’s high defensive line. Instead of clearing the ball, he collided with team-mate Alejandro Balde, giving away an easy opportunity to Benfica’s Vangelis Pavlidis, who put the hosts 2-1 up after 22 minutes. Pavlidis would make it 3-1 with a penalty eight minutes later.
Advertisement
But Szczesny was rescued by an epic Barcelona comeback for a 5-4 win — and he earned credit with an outstanding save from Angel Di Maria when it was 4-4.
His error that night in Lisbon was preceded by another major mistake he made in the Supercopa de Espana final against Real Madrid, when he was sent off for a late tackle on Kylian Mbappe.
This has been all part of a learning process for the 34-year-old former Arsenal and Juventus keeper, an emergency free-agent signing in October after Barca lost first choice Marc-Andre ter Stegen to a long-term knee injury. He has not looked back since that Benfica match, featuring in nine more games, while Barcelona remain unbeaten with him in goal — he has seven clean sheets in 13 appearances overall.
Szczesny did not come out of retirement in Marbella for an easy spell in Catalonia. He has shown a willingness to fully adapt to Hansi Flick’s high defensive line — a department in which Barcelona are genuinely one of a kind under their German head coach.
As of today, Barcelona are the leading club, by a distance, for offside calls in their favour across the big five European leagues. They have managed 143 of them in their 26 La Liga fixtures so far, according to data site fbref.com. Second are Parma in Italy’s Serie A, who have 91 in 27 games. Osasuna of La Liga (76 in 26) and Premier League side Brighton (75 in 27) complete the top four.
Barca are also first for defensive actions by their goalkeeper outside of the penalty area, with 114. That is almost double the number of next-highest Osasuna (65) and far ahead of Milan in Serie A (51) and Everton in the Premier League (50).
These figures are no accident. They are the consequences of Flick’s extremely high back line, supported by intense high pressing, which has given Barcelona a different edge this season following his summer appointment as Xavi’s successor.
“We were surprised by the radical approach Flick showed us since pre-season,” Szczesny’s fellow Barcelona goalkeeper Inaki Pena said during a December press conference. “From the first training sessions we did, he made it very clear he wanted to defend in the opposite half of the pitch. It’s a risky approach, you need to be 100 per cent focused, but you get progressively convinced by that.”
Advertisement
Pena’s words echo the learning process this style of football demands.
It also highlights that Szczesny’s mistake against Benfica was just a part of that. This is not a comfortable place for goalkeepers, at least not in terms of what they can expect to be required to do beyond their No 1 job of keeping the ball out of the net.
Here, The Athletic takes a deeper dive on life playing behind this pressing system, what teams need to do to implement the concept all across the pitch — and where the goalkeepers’ union see all this going in the future.
Barcelona’s numbers are so extreme that their current average of opposition offsides per game, 5.5, is the highest across the big European leagues over the past decade. The closest side in that period were Italy’s Sampdoria in 2016-17, with 5.1 per game. Last season’s Aston Villa in the Premier League and La Liga’s Las Palmas (both 4.3 per game) complete the podium.
Alvaro Valles was Las Palmas’ goalkeeper last season — which was the best of his career. The now 27-year-old became one of La Liga’s revelations, registering 791 touches outside his penalty area. The next busiest goalkeeper in that department was Athletic Club’s Unai Simon, with just 340.
“I remember the moment the manager, Garcia Pimienta, decided to take a new leap in our approach,” Valles tells The Athletic. “It was in summer 2023, before the start of the season. He came and told me he wanted me to play much higher up on the pitch and to become a sort of libero (sweeping defender) behind our defence.
“I hadn’t played like this before, but I’ve always been a goalkeeper who liked to play the ball with my feet. I felt comfortable in that. The manager had been working with me for over a year then, he knew my skill set and felt we could add this to our game. It all starts from the manager’s confidence to be successful with that, and you need to have the same trust.”
Las Palmas had just been promoted to La Liga after five seasons in the second tier.
“In the second division, we didn’t have that same approach,” Valles says. “If you analyse our games back then, you would not find any opposition who would press us really high and that challenged our possession-oriented game style. After promotion, the manager thought about pushing the defensive line and the goalkeeper forward as a weapon to make us more difficult to play against. He wanted us to be more brave on the ball and take risks, but also having this security net at the back.”
Las Palmas were eighth in La Liga after 16 games last season, having conceded fewer goals than Barcelona and Atletico Madrid. “A big part of our great results at the start of last campaign was that teams did not expect that approach from a newly-promoted team,” Valles says.
Another prime, and more niche, example of the daring approach has been successful for years in Germany’s second tier — 2.Bundesliga. Daniel Heuer Fernandes has been Hamburg’s first-choice goalkeeper for the past four seasons, but in possession, he has played as if he were another outfield player.
According to FootyStats.org, Heuer Fernandes has played 871 passes this season, putting him in the 70th percentile (ie, the top 30 per cent) of all players in the division.
Advertisement
“Our football is more about joy and courage and the chance to create something,” Heuer Fernandes said in a November 2023 interview with The Athletic. “That’s more important to us than the fear of something potentially going wrong. When he first joined the club, the manager (Tim Walter at that time) said it is OK if mistakes happen, because the prospect of our creating chances and scoring goals is simply greater.
“And as a player, you prefer being in possession because it is just so much fun having control over the entire game.”
With 294 La Liga games under his belt, as well as three UEFA Cups (today’s Europa League), two La Liga titles and two Copas del Rey, former Valencia and Sevilla goalkeeper Andres Palop is seen in Spain as an authority on his position.
Also a European Championship winner with Spain in 2008, the now 51-year-old retired in 2014 and works as a goalkeepers’ analyst for agency AC Talent and as a commentator with Spanish TV channel Movistar.
“This is the first year we have seen such a radical approach in La Liga over the high line — courtesy of Flick,” Palop says to The Athletic. “I don’t recall any other clear examples in previous years, especially across a full 90 minutes.
“I’ve played like that during my time as a footballer, but we used it as a solution in the last few minutes in games we were losing or in desperate need of a goal.”
Palop admits this is far from the comfort zone of any goalkeeper. He believes the biggest challenge they have to face is learning how to read spaces and timing interceptions when the opposition hit lengthier passes. “What’s tougher for the goalkeepers are the long balls in intermediate areas between them and the defensive back line, because a small mistake in there is lethal for the team,” he says.
Szczesny’s Supercopa foul on Mbappe in January (Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images)
This is something Valles agrees with.
He proudly remembers there was just one game during his breakout 2023-24 season where he messed up badly — funnily enough, against Barcelona. He was late challenging Raphinha, who had run in behind Las Palmas’ defenders: “I was unlucky, didn’t get there on time and had no other option other than to tackle him and take the red card. On other occasions, I had to be prepared for opponents taking long-range shots to take advantage of my positioning.
Advertisement
“That approach can leave you, and the team, screwed but in the end there were many more positives for us. I had only one major mistake in 36 league games, while this system allowed the team to press better because the defenders knew they had me behind them. If you add involvement on the ball from the goalkeeper, then it also has an impact on the way the opponents might press you. I remember many occasions when I had the ball on my feet practically on the halfway line to start the build-up.”
Rather than mirroring his playing style with the club’s other goalkeepers, Valles reveals they trained movements and patterns of his role with box-to-box drills. They would start with a patient build-up with him involved, and then had to track back with quick transitions towards the other end. The whole goalkeeping group would frequently have meetings with Garcia Pimienta and his tactics board.
Valles adds: “The toughest thing is reaching a perfect understanding with the defence and learning the timing on distances. In the end, you must be extremely precise and calculate when you need to step out or stay back to avoid conceding chances out of nothing, or committing a mistake that gets you sent off.”
Since 2017-18, the first campaign for which this data is available on fbref.com, the numbers for goalkeepers’ defensive actions outside their penalty area have steadily increased in the Premier League, La Liga, German Bundesliga and France’s Ligue 1. The number of attempted passes from goalkeepers has also risen across the five big leagues, also including Serie A, from an average of 24.7 per game to 29.9.
“The role of the goalkeeper has evolved even more than other positions in the game in recent years,” says Palop. “But in the shorter term, the presence of those drastic approaches with goalies will depend on managers and their footballing style.
“If setups like this are successful, trophy-wise, I can envisage them being replicated more often. This is similar to what happened after Pep Guardiola broke out at Barcelona. Even academy teams try to replicate this possession-oriented style of football.”
Managers have to apply their footballing philosophy while adapting to the qualities of their current players. Pep Ljinders, Jurgen Klopp’s long-time Liverpool assistant, spoke with the club’s website in 2021 about their aggressive approach off-the-ball and the need for pacy players to keep up with these demands: “If you play with a high line, if you play with a lot of space at your back, if you want to keep the opposition far away from your own goal, you need speed in your last line.”
Having players such as Jules Kounde helps Barcelona play the way Flick wants (Lluis Gene/AFP via Getty Images)
Barcelona’s current age profile, with players such as Jules Kounde (26 years old), Pau Cubarsi (18) and Alejandro Balde (21) in defence, is one reason that explains Flick’s quick success in instilling his pressing patterns across the squad. Although, according to Valles, the performance of every goalkeeper in that role relies heavily on what team-mates can offer.
Advertisement
“We were successful and quite out-of-the-box at Las Palmas last season, but I have to say all this praise is also a consequence of the movements, passing options and off-the-ball work rate you get from the rest of the team,” he says. “You can be the best goalkeeper in the world, but if spaces are not covered well, it’s impossible to be perfect.”
Szczesny is far from the perfect goalkeeper. But he is humble enough, after a long and successful career at club and international level, to buy into the ideas of a manager who asks him to perform in a different way to the brand of football he is used to.
Now he returns to face Benfica again — and has the opportunity to leave his ghosts behind.
(Top photo of Barcelona’s Szczesny: Florencia Tan Jun/Getty Images)
