It was a victory, one felt, that could be considered year zero if Barcelona goes on to enjoy a sustained run of success.

“This type of match will never be forgotten,” said Raphinha, Barcelona captain and hat-trick hero. It wasn’t just about beating strong opponents 4-1 in the Champions League, but how that happened, who achieved it and who was beaten.

Especially in the first half, Barcelona used an almost comically aggressive defensive line, reminiscent of the Dutch team that Johan Cruyff played for fifty years ago, let alone the Barça side he coached thirty years ago.

Barca secured victory with a total of nine players from La Masia – including the returning Dani Olmo, the only major summer signing. And it was against Bayern Munich, the club that Pep Guardiola actually defected to, the club that has such a strong record against Barcelona, ​​the club that humiliated them 8-2 four years ago.

Barcelona only repaid them 50 percent for that loss, but it was enough to produce scenes of heartfelt cheering in the stands. This will certainly be remembered as their most memorable victory during this temporary stay at the Olympic Stadium on Montjuic.

The challenge of meeting Barcelona at Camp Nou, it was often said, was the famous ‘big pitch’. But that was a misconception; the number of permitted field sizes for UEFA competitions is quite small and the ‘large field’ was mainly an optical illusion. Camp Nou was so vast, and therefore the camera angle so vertical, that the field seemed so much bigger on television. More relevant, Barcelona played with the opponent in terms of geometry, expanding the play with the ball and leaving space without the ball.

The Olympic Stadium provides a different kind of illusion. A converted athletics stadium means there is a yawning chasm, about 50 yards, behind the goal and the nearest supporters behind it. And to emphasize how far away the fans are from the action, there are often no outfielders on the entire half of the field. Barcelona have long played with a high defensive line, but this season they are taking it to new extremes.

That’s not a huge surprise given the identity of their manager. Hansi Flick was in charge of Bayern for that 8-2 win and subsequent European Cup success and the positioning of that side’s defensive line felt revolutionary in the modern era, with the liberal interpretation of the offside law. At times, Flick’s Bayern seemed to open themselves up to the simplest of attacks, yet they played with enough cohesion to step up and drop off at the right time and cover the space.

In a way, what Flick is doing with Barcelona is even braver, with less experienced defenders and Inaki Pena, a novice, in goal. But the philosophy remains clear, as summarized by Raphinha. “We knew that the further away we could be from our goal, the better for us,” he explained.

Statistics from the five major European leagues this season show that Barcelona are playing almost a different ball game to everyone else. Not only do they catch the opponent offside much more often than the other 95 teams, but they are also close to the top when it comes to through balls played behind the opponent. In other words, Barcelona allows space at the back on one side and exploits space at the back on the other.

As if to underline the risk of playing this way, Bayern are the only team to have played more through balls than them this season.

But Barcelona made no compromises, with the defenders pushing so high that at times they were practically on top of the two central midfielders, almost in a 6-0-4 shape…

The match was effectively summed up within the first minute. After twenty seconds, Barcelona’s defensive line was stepped up and several Bayern players were sidelined. They would have been warned about this in their video analysis, but still seemed surprised at the level of aggression when confronted.

That led to a long ball from Manuel Neuer to no one and possession of the ball. Then Barcelona attacked quickly and broke in at the back, while Raphinha was released.

The player closest to Raphinha demonstrating Bayern’s man-marking was central midfielder Joshua Kimmich. The defense line itself was even further away.

Raphinha became the star man and scored a hat-trick while wearing the captain’s armband. For his second goal he cut in from wide and finished, and his hat-trick goal was a combination of the previous two.

But it was that opening goal that most succinctly summed up Raphinha’s role this season; Although he sometimes went wide, he thrived in a central number 10 role, making runs across Robert Lewandowski and behind him.

“I have never had a player like Raphinha because he is incredibly dynamic, with and without the ball,” Flick said. “His speed is fantastic. Every team needs this kind of player.”

The timing of his runs, more than anything else, has proven so effective partly because he starts them from deep. And this was the perfect game for a player with that ability.

Regardless of the goals, look at this situation at the end of the first half, when the game was so compressed with two high defensive lines that Raphinha was both a central defender…

…and then a rush, within the space of four seconds, as there was only about 25 meters to walk between the two positions.

Raphinha is one of only three non-Spaniards to feature, alongside Lewandowski and right-back Jules Kounde. A curious element of Flick’s transformation of Barca is that he does not speak Spanish or Catalan, and so conducts training in English – which several members of Barca’s first team admit they don’t fully understand.

Perhaps that shows that the language barrier is not a problem, because Flick and his players have the same natural understanding of football.

This seems like a truly gifted La Masia generation. Pau Cubarsi is 17 and excellent. Holding midfielder Marc Casado, 21, reads the game superbly. Fermin Lopez is also 21 years old and times his runs intelligently. Pedri and the returning Gavi, 21 and 20 respectively, almost feel like the veterans of the team. And in this form it is impossible not to look at Lamine Yamal and think of Lionel Messi, who was not at this level at the age of seventeen.

That inevitably raises the question of how good Yamal will be and how good this Barcelona will be.

But for now, who cares? Yamal will inevitably face setbacks and so will Barça when playing this risky football, but this in itself was something to celebrate: a convincing victory with aggressive football from a group of young youth products, and therefore certainly the purest Barca victory since Guardiola’s time.