Barcelona players and Hansi Flick hold critical talks after Atletico defeat

Barcelona’s Ciutat Esportiva was an unusually tense arena on Friday morning as first-team players and head coach Hansi Flick engaged in an unscheduled but brutally frank debrief, 18 hours after a 4-0 humbling at Atlético Madrid in the first leg of the Copa del Rey semi-final.

According to multiple sources present, Flick opened the session by challenging the squad’s attitude and first-half intensity, arguing that the early capitulation at the Metropolitano betrayed the standards required to compete for major honours. The German’s rebuke prompted an equally direct response: senior players voiced tactical misgivings, insisting that the decision to persist with Barcelona’s trademark high press and elevated back line was ill-suited to the circumstances and the personnel available.

The squad’s intervention was not impulsive. Sources say the dressing-room view is that similar tactical rigidity has already cost points this season, citing the chaotic 3-3 rescue act against Club Brugge in November and the 4-1 league rout at Sevilla that preceded it. Thursday night’s defeat, they argued, merely magnified a recurring flaw.

Central to their concern is the absence of Pedri and Raphinha, both sidelined with hamstring problems. Several players believe the pair’s unique capacity to knit together Flick’s high-tempo approach has been underestimated, leaving the side exposed when replacements cannot replicate the same cohesion. Atlético, well briefed by Diego Simeone, exploited the gaps with timed runs from deep and deliberate offside traps, racing into a four-goal lead before the interval.

Yet the message conveyed to Flick was not a plea to abandon the philosophy that delivered a domestic treble last term. Instead, players asked for contextual tweaks: a more pragmatic defensive line in key fixtures and quicker adaptation to available personnel, rather than a one-size-fits-all implementation of the game model.

Further discussions are planned over the weekend, including a detailed video review of the Atlético collapse, before Barcelona travel to Girona on Monday for a league encounter in which they hold a slender one-point advantage over Real Madrid at the summit.

The timing is delicate. Raphinha, who has missed 13 matches this campaign, trained on Friday but remains under careful management. Pedri has yet to rejoin the group after injuring a hamstring against Slavia Prague on 21 January; the club initially set a minimum four-week lay-off. With the Champions League last-16 tie against either Paris Saint-Germain or Monaco looming, Flick must decide whether tactical compromise can coexist with the swashbuckling style that has come to define his tenure.

Barcelona host the second leg against Atlético on 3 March, leaving two weeks to find solutions on the training ground and, perhaps more importantly, common ground in the meeting room.