Barcelona look worryingly at home in the Europa League

Barcelona playing in the Europa League feels against the natural order of things, but by the end of a 1-1 draw with Napoli they looked every inch a second-tier side.

Barcelona on a Thursday night, slugging it out with Napoli to try and reach a Europa League last-16 stage that already has West Ham in it by right. All feels a bit wrong, doesn’t it? Confusing and discombobulating.

There’s a strange dreamlike quality to it; all the individual elements make sense, but they’re all just slightly out of context. And that sensation is only heightened by Barcelona having a familiarly unfamiliar starting front three of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang flanked by Adama Traore and Ferran Torres.

The whole confusing mess is very Barcelona in 2022, a club where Luuk De Jong offers more in a 20-minute cameo from the bench than Frenkie De Jong had all night and in which their own player Ousmane Dembele has his every touch booed.

And the match itself was a curious one as well, one which Barcelona largely dominated but didn’t really deserve to win and were quite lucky to draw via a marginal penalty awarded after a VAR intervention.

That penalty was converted by Torres, who otherwise endured a nightmare evening as his struggles since returning to Spain continue. He missed four hugely presentable chances in the first half in varyingly embarrassing fashions, the worst of which after being sent clear by a clearly now much happier Aubameyang compounded by being instantly followed by Napoli’s breakaway opening goal. It was a bad goal all round for Barca, who switched off after Torres’ miss while Pedri clearly saw and then inexplicably failed to track the run of goalscorer Piotr Zielinski before Marc-Andre ter Stegen saved the Poland midfielder’s first