Looking back at Barcelona’s 2011/2012 Season. Part 1: Backstory, Transfers, and Tactics
Barca’s journey to build further success on top of their 2011 UCL championship resulted in transfers and injury problems that stretched Pep Guardiola’s “Big Brain” to it’s limits.
At the time of writing, Barcelona just concluded their final match of the 2019/20 La Liga season and defeated Alavés 5–0. Unfortunately for them, they finished in second 5 points behind a defensively-sound but by no means stellar Real Madrid. The team seems to be in a state of turmoil as an incohesive and aging squad seems to be getting even older, instead of getting younger in order to better prepare for a post-Lionel Messi era as the greatest footballer of all time is in the twilight years of his magnificent career.
Meanwhile, over in Manchester Pep Guardiola is finishing up a domestic campaign where Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool team flew out of the blocks and never looked back in what could still be an all-time Premier League season despite their poor results since returning from the enforced break. His City team was also knocked out of the FA Cup by Arsenal led by Mikel Arteta, Pep’s assistant up until this past December. Although Barcelona and Pep can both salvage this relatively disappointing season by winning next month’s knockout version of the Champions League in August, they both seem to be in an uncomfortable spot. For a club and a manager who are always held to the utmost standard, a season without total domination is almost seen as a failure, similar to when these two broke up back in 2012.
To say that FC Barcelona were the best football team in the world leading up to 2011/12 football season might actually be an understatement, as they could make a claim for being the greatest football team ever, rivaling teams such as United in the late 90s and AC Milan under Arrigo Sacchi. La Blaugrana were a year and a half removed from a 2009 calendar year in which they won every competition they competed in (six trophies are still the most for a top European club) as Pep Guardiola’s first full year as a senior manager was the pinnacle of footballing success.
Earlier in 2011, after defeating Arsenal in the second leg of the Champions League Round of 16 — with the help of a questionable refereeing decision to send off Robin Van Persie on a second yellow — Barcelona made easy work of Shakhtar in the quarters and after an El Clasico semi-final, found themselves in a rematch of the 2009 UCL final. In that 2011 final, the first half was a relatively tight affair as Pedro opened the scoring in the 27th minute until Wayne Rooney canceled that out and equalized seven minutes later. In the second half, two efforts from outside the box, first from Messi, and a second from Spain’s all-time leading goalscorer David Villa sealed Barca’s second UCL trophy in as many years apart. This aging Manchester United squad were two years and a Cristiano Ronaldo removed from the ’09 defeat and were no match for this team in their prime, resulting in the legendary Sir Alex Ferguson to hail them as the greatest team he’s ever faced. In Pep’s first three seasons as a coach, he had won three La Liga titles, two Copa del Reys, and two UEFA Champions League titles.
So when it came to the summer of 2011 the objective seemed simple, reload and go again. However, the simple things are sometimes the hardest to execute, especially in the case of FC Barcelona. The signing of Alexis Sánchez replaced a disgruntled Bojan on his way to join AS Roma – Bojan showed a lot of promise and was compared to his star teammates early in his career, but ultimately could never truly deliver on that promise – Sánchez strengthened a thin front line that comprised of only three clear first team options at the time (Messi, Villa, and Pedro).
The re-signing of Premier League wizard Cesc Fabregas was extremely well received albeit not fully thought out, Cesc was up against the unenviable task of carving out a place in team that included the textbook definition of a balanced midfield – Iniesta, Xavi, and Sergio Busquets – which is what ultimately led to his return to the Prem in 2014 when he joined Chelsea after the arrival of Neymar a year earlier limited his minutes further, and the signing of Luis Suárez the same summer he left would’ve almost certainly made him best friends with the substitutes bench had he stuck around.
The funds for the Fabregas deal could have been used elsewhere in the squad, specifically to strengthen the backline. The only two legitimate centre-backs on the books for Barca this season were a 33 year old Carles Puyol, and Gerard Pique. Javier Mascherano — who is nominally a defensive midfielder — did play most of his minutes for Barca as a centre-back, once u pass those three names in the depth chart, the next name you see would be Andreu Fontás. A player who made over 70 appearances for Barcelona B, but only ended up featuring 16 times for the senior team.
In the aforementioned 2011 tie vs Arsenal, Guardiola started the game with defensive-midfielder Busquets and left-back Eric Abidal as his center-back pairing. Abidal, who a week later was diagnosed with a tumor in his kidney, would return later in the 11/12 season but miss time the following season which we’ll touch on in Part 2. Although Abidal was a great servant to the club, he was on the wrong side of 30 for the 11/12 season and given his health problems as well as the selling of Maxwell to PSG in January, another left-back option outside of Brazillian Adriano would have given Guardiola the squad depth necessary to compete in multiple competitions.
Since the days of Johan Cruyff, Barcelona’s entire identity as a club has been based on possession-heavy attacking football, finding the right defenders for this style of play is very tough but the Barca board failed Guardiola by not being able to supply him with enough depth at the back and give him the best chance at bringing even more trophies to the Camp Nou.
One of Guardiola’s tactical masterstrokes during his four years in Catalonia was how the attack became more and more focused on maximizing the otherworldly talent of Lionel Messi. When he first debuted under Frank Rijkaard, Leo mostly featured on the right-wing. Once Guardiola took over this presented a small problem since a hallmark of Pep’s teams is that the wingers stay high and wide until they spring to life in the final third, this is something Messi is perfectly capable of but diminishes his ability to pick the ball up from deep and essentially carry it into the net which was and still is one of his trademark attributes. Guardiola’s solution to this was playing Leo as a “false nine” and giving him the freedom to drop into midfield and pick up the ball in areas where he can run at defenses. In the 2011/12 season, the tactics of how everyone else fits around Messi was the most diverse during Pep’s tenure.
For the ’09 and ’11 Champions league winning seasons, Messi was usually flanked by Samuel Eto’o and Thierry Henry in 08/09, David Villa and Pedro Rodriguez in 10/11. Unfortunately, Villa dealt with injuries in 11/12 and only made 24 appearances in all competitions, this allowed new arrival Sánchez to make an instant impact with 41 appearances in his first season playing on the right or left-wing and although he doesn’t offer the same goal threat as Villa, his dynamism and relentless work rate gave Barca another dimension as he was in the process of becoming the world-class attacker he developed into in later years. More interestingly, given that Gerard Pique also dealt with injury problems and only played in 38 out of 64 games that season, Guardiola was forced to rework his tactics and sometimes stray away from the 4–3–3, the principal formation for both Guardiola and Barcelona.
Sometimes, Barca would lineup in what was a 4 at the back only by name. Dani Alves would play in a position that can be described as a right wingback, where he maintained the width for that side of the pitch both in attack and defence, while the opposite full-back (Abidal until Adriano took over for him) played more traditionally and balanced, sometimes creating a 3-man defense.
As teams would drop deeper to try and cope with their attacking, Pep even experimented with 2 defender formations and even a singular defender could be seen covering the entire back line at times in an inverted Pyramid (1–2–3–4) formation stretching the limits of what is known as Total Football.
Cesc Fabregas or Andrés Iniesta would fill in on the left-wing in the team sheet but mainly play infield in the left half-space or in Fabregas’s case, sometimes play up top with Messi as double “false 9s” where they took turns dropping into midfield or making runs in behind while the more traditional wingers (Pedro or Sánchez) would hold the width on whichever flank they played on. But when Barcelona played in their more conventional formation both Sánchez and Pedro would start as wingers, with Isaac Cuenca and Christian Tello who were viewed as promising youngsters at the time, gained match experience in the absence of the Chilean or the Spaniard. Javier Mascherano played his usual role for Barca filling in for Pique and Busquets when required and he was definitely required this season, especially as a CB and made the second-most appearances for the side in 11/12. In the absence of any defenders or attackers due to injury or squad rotation, Guardiola’s first instinct was to flood the pitch with more midfielders as Thiago Alcantara and Seydou Keita both racked up over 40 appearances each, you could sometimes count up to 9 midfielders on the pitch at the same time proven by how 7 of the 11 top outfield appearance makers this season were all naturally midfielders which is why the lineup graphic accounts for starts to accommodate for this discrepancy.
In Part 2, I will discuss the storylines and outcomes of the season, ending in the conclusion of Pep’s reign as Barcelona manager and the one-year sabbatical that followed his departure.
