Barcelona's defense is underbuilt, and the people who underbuilt it are Deco and the board. The injuries this week exposed a squad that was always one bad tackle away from having nobody to play.
Look at the week in front of them. A Champions League trip to PSG on Tuesday, a Clásico against Real Madrid on Sunday, and Hansi Flick can't name either of the two players he's used at right-back this season. Eric García went off with a thigh injury and is out for up to four weeks, which rules him out of both games. Jules Koundé sprained an ankle in the same match and misses PSG. Andreas Christensen, the obvious man to patch the hole, was already sidelined. Three senior defenders unavailable heading into the biggest stretch of the season.
Flick's football costs you something at the back. Push forward and score goals, and you'll leave gaps behind you. Barcelona have scored at a historic clip, 48 goals in 11 games across all competitions this week, and they've ridden that into nine straight LaLiga wins, equaling the best start to a season in league history. A team doing that can trade a goal here and there.
But depth is what determines whether you've got a right-back fit to play. The moment the squad got tested, it had none. Two injuries and a pre-existing one left Flick improvising at the back against PSG and Madrid in the same week because the roster has no depth.
The summer is where this started. Barcelona identified a left-footed centre-back as the need, went hard for Aymeric Laporte, and expected to get him out of Athletic Club for under €15 million. Athletic priced him at nearly double that, somewhere between €25 and €30 million, and the deal collapsed amid bad blood between the clubs. Barcelona then tried Ruud Nystad as a fallback, and that went nowhere either. The window shut with the exact position they'd flagged as a weakness still unaddressed.
Now put the Álvaro Cortés sale next to that. Barcelona let a defender they rated go to Royal Antwerp for €3.5 million, keeping a buy-back option and a sell-on clause so they could feel clever about it later. Selling a young defender for small money while you're publicly failing to sign a senior one is the kind of planning that looks fine in July and indefensible in October. When García and Koundé went down, Cortés was in Belgium.
Even the Christensen extension reads like a club that knew it was exposed. They tied him down until 2028 on a sharply reduced base salary, with bonuses that could push him back toward €8 or €9 million, and they wrote in a clause letting either side walk after a single year. You don't build that escape hatch into a contract unless you're worried about the player's fitness. They were worried, they kept him anyway, and they didn't buy insurance behind him.
The panic is justified. The results are real and the attack is frightening, and none of that changes what the people running recruitment did: they looked at a thin defense, missed on their top target all summer, sold a young option for pocket money, and now they're sending a makeshift back line to Paris and then into a Clásico. Scoring goals doesn't fix a transfer plan that fell apart and was never repaired.
If Barcelona drop points in the next eight days, nobody should blame bad luck. The luck part is the injuries. Deco is the reason those injuries turned into a crisis.
