Hansi Flick sent Barcelona to Mestalla on Saturday at 9pm CEST for the final match of the 2025/26 season with several regulars missing and the title already secured.
Flick confirmed Raphinha was left out of the squad because “Raphinha was feeling a bit off yesterday, so we’ve decided to have him stay at home. We don’t want to take any risks.” He also deployed the squad without Lamine Yamal, Fermín López and Jules Kounde for the trip to Valencia.
The omission of Raphinha and the three absences matters because Barcelona entered the fixture as La Liga champions and were chasing a tidy numerical finish: the side had 31 wins so far this season and, as Flick put it, “For me, it’s always important when we train, when we play, so we have to stay focused. We have 31 wins, but 32 is a better number.” A win would have taken the champions to 97 points.
Barcelona had already secured their 29th La Liga title before the match and had become the first team to finish a season with a perfect home record since the league expanded to 20 teams. The club celebrated the title with a parade across the streets of Barcelona earlier in the campaign and arrived at Mestalla with that achievement already in the bag.
Valencia approached the game with their own variables. The home side had won three of their last five matches and still had a mathematical route into the UEFA Conference League if Getafe and Rayo Vallecano lost elsewhere that weekend. Complicating Valencia’s preparations, José Luis Gayà, Renzo Saravia, José Copete and Dimitri Foulquie had not trained with the first team since the start of the week.
The scheduling and stakes made for an unusual final day: a title already decided, a champion managing minutes and risk, and a midtable team with a last-gasp European hope made contingent on other results. Coverage around the closing rounds of the season ranged from farewells at Camp Nou to final training notes elsewhere — including a look back at Lewandowski’s Camp Nou farewell in LaLiga’s 37th jornada ( and other late-stage fixtures such as Sevilla’s build-up ( and Valencia’s own test against Rayo (
The tension in the fixture was not dramatic in the standings but practical: Barcelona’s manager prioritized player welfare over the symbolic gain of another win, while Valencia faced internal availability issues at the same time as chasing an unlikely European lifeline. That created a mismatch between the headline—champions visiting to complete a near-perfect campaign—and the choices being made on the touchline.
Flick’s approach underlines a clear hierarchy of priorities. With the title secured and a perfect home record already recorded, the coach chose to avoid risking players’ fitness for a statistical finish. That decision — stated plainly when he explained Raphinha’s absence and when he noted the team’s 31 wins — shows Barcelona treating the final match as exercise in squad management rather than a must-win finale.
What happens next is simple: Barcelona will take the season’s hardware, the home record and whatever final points they earn in Valencia into the summer, and Flick’s selection signals a shift from chasing a round-number milestone to preserving the group. For Valencia, the unanswered practical question is whether their late-week absences will cost them any realistic chance of slipping into European competition through other results — a possibility that depended, in any case, on the weekend’s outcomes elsewhere.
