Girona were Barcelona’s friendly neighbours – now they are serious title rivals

After Jules Kounde, Barcelona’s last man, missed a 50-50 challenge and Girona-born Valery Fernandez ran through to give his side a 3-1 lead, many home fans decided they had seen enough.

There were still at least 10 minutes left, but some Barca supporters started to leave, acknowledging that a rival once considered just a friendly fellow Catalan football club had totally outplayed them, performing in a way Xavi’s team have been unable to of late.

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When Cristhian Stuani rounded off the scoring, making it 4-2 in stoppage time, he rushed to celebrate behind Inaki Pena’s goal, looking up to where the away fans were seated at the very top of the Estadi Olimpic Lluis Companys. Substitutes and backroom staff from the Girona bench couldn’t hold themselves back and ran their half of the pitch to join the celebrations.

Girona had taken over the Catalan derby and they are now outright leaders at the top of La Liga. Some of the Barca fans still left from the 42,000 in attendance on Montjuic booed their team. Girona supporters sat among them, jumping and dancing over a turning point in their history.

“If we win at Barcelona, this club will indeed enter a new dimension,” Girona manager Michel said in his pre-match press conference on Saturday. Well, here’s the new world: they are entitled to be considered as real title contenders this season.

“It’s not our target to win La Liga and I don’t want to compare our team to anyone, but we play really, really well,” the 48-year-old said after the game. “It was a great advert for La Liga, two teams wanting to attack and score goals. Any football fan watching this will have ended up feeling more sympathy for Girona. I don’t know if we can win La Liga, but tonight I realised we can beat any opponent.”

Girona now have 41 points after 16 matches — the fourth-best record of any league leader at this stage of the competition. Sixteen years ago, they were playing in Spain’s fourth tier. If we go back 24 seasons, they were in the fifth division, a regional league in which they only faced clubs close to their home province in Catalonia. This is a club used to seeing 200 people attending home games not that long ago, one that was painfully accustomed to living with few locals supporting them.

“Girona citizens were mainly Barcelona, Real Madrid or even Espanyol fans,” Girona president Delfi Geli told The Athletic two weeks ago. “This was our reality and the closest we could get to the elite. The city once had a basketball team in the national top flight, but football… you had to look elsewhere.”

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Girona captain Aleix Garcia, 26, said this week that he has been a Barcelona fan since childhood and that he’d love to play for the club at some point. A similar parallel can be drawn with Eric Garcia, on loan at Girona this season from Barca. He was a La Masia player from the age of five and is a lifelong Barca fan. Catalan children did not use to support Girona. The club was so far from the Spanish giants they had only faced Barcelona once before 2017 — the year they got promoted to La Liga for the first time.

But last night, in Girona’s first win against Barca, they completed their mission in the very same way any of the best Barcelona sides would have done.

They fought toe-to-toe for possession (Girona ended up with 47 per cent), but most impressive of all was how they built from the back, even with Barca’s high pressure, creating tactical patterns that dismantled Xavi’s plans. Real Madrid academy product Miguel Gutierrez, 22, was arguably the star of the show in that department — a left-back who cuts inside and turns into a crafty attacking midfielder.

Barcelona did not play a horrible game of football — they registered an expected goals (xG) of 4.06 compared to 2.40 xG for the away side, suggesting Xavi’s side created more high-quality chances – but Girona’s fearless approach was a reminder of what Barca fans would like to see in their team and have not seen for some time.

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A big part of what’s been recently built in Girona, funded by the City Football Group umbrella, has to do with Barcelona’s identity. Girona’s president, Geli, is a former La Masia player. Their sporting director, Quique Carcel, is another La Masia product. One of the co-owners is Pep Guardiola’s brother, Pere.

Above them all, from Manchester, there’s the former Barcelona executive Ferran Soriano closely monitoring. In 2021, they found in Michel a manager who shares the same vision on how to play football. The rest has been a combination of trust, time and long-term vision.

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After Michel’s first 10 games at the club, Girona were in the relegation zone in Spain’s second tier. Two years later and 16 games into this campaign, they’re the country’s top-ranked team.

Girona are now a major rival, an opponent Barcelona must take seriously. Last season, Barca president Joan Laporta stated they wanted to improve their links with Girona and loan them out any young prospects who could benefit both parties. Two summers ago, Girona asked for but failed to secure the loan of Abde Ezzalzouli. At the start of last summer, they managed to get 20-year-old Pablo Torre.

In the same way, Barcelona have recently started to show a growing interest in Girona’s assets. Oriol Romeu is the latest example. The best Girona player last season couldn’t resist Barcelona’s appeal and in July, he decided to leave. He was an unused substitute for Barca on Sunday night, witnessing his former team-mates go two points clear at the top of the table.

There will certainly be more cases like Romeu’s — and expect one of them to be Savio. The 19-year-old Girona winger is highly admired by Barcelona’s sporting direction. With the City Football Group involved, though, it seems very unlikely they could make it happen.

But there’s hardly a more poignant example of this changing relationship than Garcia.

Barcelona agreed to loan out Garcia, 22, last summer to make room on their salary limit and register deadline-day loan signings Joao Cancelo and Joao Felix.

Xavi wanted Garcia to stay, but the player felt out of favour, being the manager’s fifth-choice centre-back, and was desperate for game time. He received proposals from Girona and Real Betis but, after speaking to Michel, decided it could only be Girona.

“Eric Garcia just understands it all,” a Girona executive source told The Athletic before last night’s game, preferring to speak anonymously to protect relationships.

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“The match we won at Rayo Vallecano (on November 11), he was outstanding in the second half. The most brilliant thing he does is not just the clean pass in the build-up that breaks two pressing lines — anyone could see something like that. What we really value from him is how, sometimes, he just passes the ball to the full-back to then reposition himself on a deeper area of the pitch.

“He makes the opposition move, receives the ball back on another simple pass and then spots the right gap he’s created with the movement, getting the ball through there to escape the pressure. This is the typical Barcelona DNA. It’s the football we want to play. He knows how vital this is for us.”

On Sunday night, Garcia completed another excellent display, against his parent club. The way Girona are making the best of their squad painfully stings compared to what is happening at Barcelona.

It is hard to remember when Barca were so outplayed by a local rival. The result will live long in the memory. After the game, Xavi could do nothing else but tell it like it is.

“Girona can fight for the title,” he said. “They are La Liga candidates. This team has a lot of things in them and I can only praise the work Michel has done.”

(Top photo: Javier Borrego/Europa Press via Getty Images)