Contents
By Matt Smith
Hansi Flick’s men will be looking to extend their lead at the top of LaLiga to seven points, and the Catalan giants are on a strong run of form, winning five games on the bounce.
When the two sides met back in December in the league, Barcelona secured a 3-1 victory on their own turf.
Team news
Atlético are set to be without both Marcos Llorente and Johnny Cardoso, with the duo suspended for the game against Barcelona. Pablo Barrios will also miss out due to injury, while Jan Oblak, Alexander Sørloth, Rodrigo Mendoza, and Marc Pubill are doubts.
Meanwhile, Raphinha will be unavailable for Barcelona after picking up an injury while on international duty with Brazil. He joins Andreas Christensen and Frenkie De Jong on the treatment table.
Goals win games
Barcelona have been far and away the best team in LaLiga and one of the best in Europe when it comes to their attacking production. Flick’s side are creating chances at will, and converting them more than efficiently.
Barcelona’s defence has been leaky at times, but as basic as it sounds, creating as many chances as they do, the struggles at the back rarely matter. The Catalan giants have conceded more goals than Real Madrid and the same as Atlético, but nobody gets close to them when it comes to finding the back of the net.
Atlético’s direct and effective style
Diego Simeone is known for his aggressive and intense style, and he’s a rare profile of manager at the top-level of football at the moment. Many coaches have a large focus on short passing and playing out from the back, but Atlético are enjoying success with a more direct style.
Against Barcelona, who often deploy a high line, we might see some success from Simeone’s men in behind the opposition defence. When the two sides met in the Copa del Rey first-leg back in February, we saw just that, with Atlético securing a 4-0 victory.
Rashford to step up
With Raphinha out injured, there’s a real opportunity for Marcus Rashford to step up to the plate. The English forward has struggled for minutes of late, but he’s proven to be an effective asset in the final third when given an opportunity to impress.
Rashford, who is on loan from Manchester United, might not have been given the chances he would have hoped for in recent months, but he now has the opportunity to prove his worth to Flick and make the left-wing position his own.
Prediction
It’s a difficult game to call with Atlético a tough side on their own turf, so we’re going for a 2-2 draw in this one.
(Cover image from IMAGO)
You can follow every game from LaLiga with FotMob this season — featuring deep stats coverage, xG, and player ratings. Download the free app here.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.