Barcelona's Title Dreams Dashed by Alaves

Barcelona’s pursuit of perfection died on a cool night in Vitoria, undone by a team fighting for its life.

Newly-crowned champions or not, Hansi Flick’s side arrived at Alaves with a clear target: win their final three games and drag themselves level with La Liga’s all-time benchmark of 100 points. They didn’t even clear the first hurdle.

Alaves 1, Barcelona 0. The record chase is over. The relegation fight is very much alive.

Champions flat, Alaves ferocious

Barcelona’s week had felt like a coronation. A Clasico win on Sunday to seal back-to-back titles. An open-top bus parade through the city on Monday. The party was loud, deserved, and long.

In Vitoria, the hangover showed.

Flick rotated heavily, handing a debut to 21-year-old centre-back Alvaro Cortes and reshaping the side that had just conquered Real Madrid. The ball still belonged to Barcelona, as it usually does, and Marcus Rashford tried to inject tempo from the flank. But possession without edge suited Alaves just fine.

Quique Sanchez Flores set his team up to suffer, and they did so willingly. They pressed in bursts, dropped deep in numbers, and treated every clearance like a small victory. For a side staring at the drop, this was survival football, stripped of frills and full of purpose.

The breakthrough came at the worst possible time for the champions and the perfect one for the hosts.

Deep into first-half stoppage time, a corner caused panic where there should have been control. Antonio Blanco rose and headed the ball back towards goal. Barcelona’s defenders hesitated for a fatal second. Ibrahim Diabate did not. He pounced and drove his finish past Wojciech Szczesny, punishing a line that simply failed to react.

One lapse, one goal, and a stadium that had been anxious all week suddenly roared with belief.

Diabate leads the charge for survival

The goal did more than tilt the scoreboard. It changed the temperature of the game.

Alaves came out after the interval with the conviction of a side that had seen a route out of the relegation zone and intended to sprint through it. Diabate, already the hero of the night, almost doubled the lead early in the second half, forcing Szczesny into a sharp save with a stinging effort.

Barcelona, by contrast, laboured. They had the ball, but not the ideas. The patterns were slow, the runs predictable, the urgency dulled by the security of a title already won. Flick, speaking afterwards, chose to highlight the positives: the minutes for youngsters, the chance to manage workloads after an intense run, the fight shown by a team with little left to prove in the table.

But the game itself belonged to Alaves and their desperation.

The clearest sign of that came from Jon Guridi. With Barcelona stretched, he burst through and beat Szczesny with a driven shot across goal, only to see it crash back off the post. It would have been a spectacular second, and it underlined just how close Alaves came to turning a vital win into a statement.

They didn’t need the extra goal in the end. Diabate’s strike, and the discipline that followed it, were enough. The victory dragged Sanchez Flores’s side out of the drop zone and up to 15th, a small climb that feels enormous when the trapdoor has been creaking under your feet for weeks.

Flick looks to the future, Alaves cling to the present

Flick did not disguise the difficulty of the night.

“It was not an easy game,” he admitted, acknowledging the hardness of the battle and the reality that Alaves are “fighting to stay in La Liga.” His focus, though, stayed on what comes next for Barcelona rather than what slipped away. The 100-point dream has gone, but the German coach will bank the experience for Cortes and the rest of his rotated cast.

Barcelona’s performance, flat in patches and short of incision, carried the unmistakable air of a team that has already climbed its mountain. The edge that cut through Real Madrid at the weekend never really appeared here.

Alaves, on the other hand, played like a side staring down the barrel. Every duel mattered. Every second ball. Every sprint. The three points they clawed out of the champions may prove far more valuable than any flourish in a more glamorous fixture.

On a night when Barcelona’s grand chase for records fizzled out, Alaves found something far more basic and far more urgent: a way to keep breathing.