If there was a match to showcase the incredible skills, brains, and speed of the Spanish club’s attacking trio, this was it. All four goals in the eventual 4-0 score came through some combination of Raphinha, Robert Lewandowski and Lamine Yamal.
In creating such havoc in the opposition’s box, the trio was following in the footsteps of some of the greatest three-person attacking formations in football. And, over the years, no club has put together more devastating trios than Barcelona.
The most famed of those, of course, featured Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar.
In the three years that they played together (2014-17), they proved too overwhelming for any team to contain. They were simply faster, stronger and more skilled; they were gifted with sharper footballing brains and endowed with a few generations’ worth of creativity. They seemed almost telepathically connected.
In those three years, they scored 363 goals, and swept up every trophy on offer. Made up of three of the greatest forwards in history, this was arguably the greatest attacking trio ever the grace the game.
That’s the kind of thing that happens once in several decades, for most clubs. But for Barcelona, it has happened repeatedly and consistently. One can trace the great trios all the way back to the 1990s, when the Dutch football revolutionary Johan Cruyff set about changing the game and building Barcelona’s “dream team”.
As he pushed football away from the 4-4-2 formation that had come to dominate it — the one where strikers hunted in pairs — to one where formations became fluid, limited only by the imagination of the coach and the skills of the players, he had help.
Cruyff’s three attacking leads were Romario, Michael Laudrup and Hristo Stoichkov. By the mid-Aughts, that torch was being passed to Rivaldo, Patrick Kluivert and Javier Saviola.
Cruyff’s protégé Pep Guardiola then took over as coach, and he pushed Cruyff’s ideas further. It was under Guardiola that two of the greatest forwards of all time, Thierry Henry and Samuel Eto’o, came together with a young Messi and immediately led Barcelona back to the top, with the club’s first-ever continental treble, in 2008-09. They scored over 100 goals between them in that season alone.
Play became even more electric, if a bit less efficient, when Ronaldinho replaced Henry in that trident. But if Messi’s greatest trio was the one he formed with Suarez and Neymar (which also earned the club its second treble, in 2014-15), an almost-forgotten partnership that was almost as devastating was formed in 2010, with David Villa and Pedro. In these two men, Guardiola found players with the extreme speed he needed, in order to fully exploit and showcase Messi’s creative genius. Put the two Spaniards high and wide, with Messi in the middle, and it was just smooth going all the way to the La Liga and Champions League titles.
At the start of the 2024-25 season, it did not seem like Raphinha, Lewandowski and Yamal were in the same league as these famed trios. A year ago, Raphinha was a brilliant player, but so moody he was in fact on Barca’s list of players to offload (to the Saudi league if necessary). Lewandowski’s signing was seen as a mistake; he was viewed as too far past his prime. Yamal was just a precociously talented kid who could be the next Messi or could disappear into relative obscurity, as so many teens with such promise had done.
As things stand, Raphinha has turned into the most consistently deadly forward in the world. Lewandowski, a goalscoring machine at Bayern Munich, has simply picked up where he left off. Yamal is the toast of the footballing world for his preternatural skill.
The legacy of the Barca trio is alive and well. Could this be the year of the third treble?
(To reach Rudraneil Sengupta with feedback, email rudraneil@gmail.com)
