Barcelona, Real Madrid’s Rapid Starts Make Ominous Viewing for Rest of La Liga

It didn’t take long.

Fans were still taking their seats at the Camp Nou, but already Barcelona were off and running. In trademark fashion, Lionel Messi, coming deep, had picked out Jordi Alba with a chipped, cross-field ball. Alba in turn found Arda Turan in the middle of the box—outside-of-the-boot flick, goal. Barcelona’s season wasn’t yet 400 seconds old, and already they were doing it.

Real Madrid needed even fewer. Only 73 seconds had passed at Anoeta Stadium a day later when Gareth Bale thumped a header past Geronimo Rulli from Dani Carvajal’s cross. It was Bale being Bale—bigger, stronger, better—but it was the speed of it that was most striking.

Like Barcelona, Real Madrid had picked up where they left off.

It’s as if summer never happened.

For clubs such as these, summers are typically a time for adjustment. Between seasons, such periods are used for vast strengthening, restructuring or upheaval on several levels. Most obvious are the changes that often occur within squads and in the dugouts, but just as significant can be alterations in one’s tactical template, movement among the backroom staff and the tweaking of training methods—particularly with regard to the physiological concept of “peaking.”

The knock-on effect of all of this is that clubs tend to enter new seasons still figuring things out, still working through issues. That might be more true now than ever before given the way football’s current landscape demands clubs spend summers prioritising commercial activity over planning.

In short, you’re not meant to start seasons at foot-to-the-floor speed. Ominously, though, it looks as though Barcelona and Real Madrid might be set to do so.

What ever Barcelona can do…Gareth Bale scores Real Madrid’s first goal of 2016/17 La Liga after just 2 minutes