Six goals past Alavés, and it tells you almost nothing about whether Barcelona can actually win this league. It tells you they can take a mid-table team that parked itself on its own goal line and beat it senseless. Everyone already knew that.
Saturday at the Spotify Camp Nou was a lovely afternoon. Raphinha scored inside the first ten minutes and again before the break, Fermín López added one, and Lamine Yamal finished off a João Cancelo pass with a long-range shot into the bottom corner right on the stroke of half-time to make it 4-0. Yamal got a second after the restart, Anthony Gordon joined in, and Mariano Díaz pulled one back for a 6-1 final. Barcelona had 76% of the ball. Alavés barely crossed halfway. This is what the best attacking side in Spain does to a team that offers nothing.
And that's exactly the problem with using it as proof of anything. The game the whole argument hangs on happened in the eleven days before this one, twice.
Start in Paris. PSG beat Barcelona 4-2 in the Champions League, a game of forty attempts on goal, with Vitinha and Fabián Ruiz striking late to punish a defense that spent the night getting pulled apart. Then came the Clásico, at home, where Real Madrid won 2-1 through a Kylian Mbappé double. Had Barcelona taken that one, they'd have broken Real's 1968-69 mark for the best-ever start to a Spanish top-flight season. They blew it. Two of the biggest nights available this autumn, and Barcelona lost both, back to back, in front of their own fans and in Europe.
Look at what Hansi Flick had to put on the pitch against Alavés. Frenkie de Jong started at centre-back for the first time this season, a central midfielder dropped into the back line next to Pau Cubarsí because Andreas Christensen is injured and there's nobody else behind him. It was a club covering a hole with whoever it had. Alavés were never going to expose it. PSG did. Madrid did.
There's a real point for the other side: titles get won by thrashing exactly these teams, week after week, while you wait for the big nights to break your way. Barcelona banked three points and a goal difference that, in LaLiga, is in a class of its own, miles clear of Atlético Madrid and Real Madrid. Through eleven of thirty-eight rounds they sit top on 30 points, clear of both. Those points are real and they count the same in May. Nobody's handing them back.
But "we scored six against a team that couldn't hurt us" doesn't answer "we get carved open by anyone who can." Those are different questions, and only one of them decides a title. Barcelona's attack was never in doubt. Yamal, Raphinha, Fermín, the whole front line, they'll do this to half the division. The back of the team is the problem, and the people responsible are the ones who kept promising a centre-back and kept not signing one, leaving a treble-winning manager to start a midfielder at the heart of the defense against Europe's best.
So enjoy the highlight reel. Yamal's goal was filthy and the football is as good to watch as anything in Spain right now. Just don't let a scoreline against the division's also-rans wash away what the actual contenders already showed you. Title credentials get tested against PSG and Madrid. Barcelona sat that exam twice this month and failed both times.
