Barcelona's Excellence Prompts Tantalising Question: How Far Can This All Go?

Luis Enrique's message has been consistent.

"Praise weakens you," the Barcelona manager has said on multiple occasions recently, maintaining a coach's archetypal standpoint, warning his players of the threat their own minds can pose to themselves.

Yet at times, even Enrique has battled to listen to his own words; more than once he's looked like, well, the rest of us. 

Late last month, as Barcelona threatened to score 15 against Roma and eventually settled for six, Enrique couldn't help himself. As the goals poured in, as his team redefined the word "clinic," the manager's face took on the look of a young boy's after seeing his dad pull the coin-behind-the-ear trick for the very first time.

It was a look of wonderment, almost of disbelief. Though he didn't do it vocally, Enrique was essentially handing out praise through his uncontainable reaction, with everything about him—his eyes, his amazed smile, his body language, his entire being—saying exactly what the rest of us were: "C'mon, are you serious? You can't play like that, can you?"

It turns out you can. Well, they can. 

That night at the Camp Nou, the first goal from Luis Suarez came after Neymar took out nine players with one pass. The second was just ridiculous: Neymar to Lionel Messi, Messi to Suarez, Suarez back to Messi. Chip. Goal.

Suarez then hammered a swerving, outside-of-the-boot volley for the third. The fourth was a carbon copy of the second, only it was Gerard Pique on the end of it. For the fifth, those three—yeah, those three—were at it again, at which point not even the adjectives of the Ray Hudson Soundboard were enough. Like, not even close to enough. 

It was at that exact moment, as the fifth goal went in, when the question that had been lingering began to demand an answer. Suddenly, it just had to be asked seriously, and it wasn't just a question but the question: How far can this all go?

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That night, as Barcelona made Roma look like a pub team, something strange happened. 

Free from work for the evening, I'd settled in to catch my own team in action, but thanks to the gateway into all of Europe otherwise known as the red button, in the middle of a pause in play I'd found myself flicking through the night's other games, stumbling across the clash at the Camp Nou just as the second goal unfolded. 

In nearly all other circumstances, I'd have watched the replay of the goal and then flicked back. But that's not what happened. There was something about that goal, both in its artistic structure and in its protagonists, from which you couldn't turn away. You just couldn't.

As a result, the remote was put down—whether it was a conscious decision, I don't know—as the action became all-consuming for the eyes. It never let up. Half an hour later, I'd missed almost the entire first half of the game I'd intended to watch. In the end, I basically missed the whole thing, as Barcelona made me forget about my own team, but somehow it didn't matter—there would be a replay to watch, and this had to be witnessed live. 

But why?

Almost six months earlier, when Barcelona had lifted the European Cup in Berlin to claim a historic treble in Enrique's first season, you couldn't help but feel they'd peaked, that they'd hit a ceiling. In a single campaign, they'd shrugged off a sense of staleness that had crept in at the club a season earlier, storming to a truly absurd 175 goals in all competitions and challenging so much of what we'd previously believed in the process.

When the team had been assembled and Suarez joined Messi and Neymar, the popular belief was that it wouldn't work. It did. We'd also assumed that Messi, after plateauing, couldn't go any higher. He did. We'd said Pep Guardiola's Barcelona couldn't be matched. They were. 

That European Cup held aloft in Berlin felt like the outer point of excellence as we knew it. But now that's being challenged, too. 

OLIVIER MORIN/Getty Images

At times this season, Barcelona have looked even better again, the consecutive demolitions of Real Madrid and Roma suggesting that any talk of a ceiling being hit was misguided. This is somehow still going north, and how it is doing so is utterly compelling. 

Unlike previous incarnations of Barcelona, this current outfit likes to exist within games in a far more chaotic state. More than ever before, the pitch is open and the game is stretched; though perhaps less disciplined, Barcelona now dare their opponents to fight and not just resist, knowing the eyes of the three monsters in attack sparkle like those of Heath Ledger's Joker amid the chaos—and now more than ever, too, which is notable in itself. 

Indeed, though the ability of Messi—and Andres Iniesta and Sergio Busquets, for that matter—to win, take stock and then go again and again was never in question, it was hard to know how Neymar and Suarez would handle the post-treble period.

For Neymar, there was the suspicion that he might cruise from here. Blessed with extraordinary talent but often exhibiting a showman's mentality, you could envisage the treble satisfying him, taking the edge off his daily work and possibly steering him down the path of Ronaldinho rather than Messi.

But the early evidence suggests the contrary is unfolding: He can taste it and see it; he's following the latter and not the former. 

In Messi's injury absence this season, no one was left in any doubt that Neymar was Barcelona's leader. In a nine-game stretch, he scored 11 and made another seven, for two months standing as the continent's dominant player and firing an ominous warning about his personal trajectory while doing so.

Even the haircut said something: I'm here to work. 

Manu Fernandez/Associated Press

For Suarez, the risks seemed similar, even if the circumstances were different. After a decade spent away from the game's pinnacle at Nacional, Groningen, Ajax and Liverpool, he could have been excused if he saw last season's treble as a finishing point rather than a kick-starter of something. He'd finally triumphed and would go down in history with this team as it was; what else was there for him? 

A lot else, apparently.

So far this term, Suarez has been furiously relentless. Brain-hurtingly so. Every. Single. Day. Of. The. Season. 

Playing against him must be among football's most horrible experiences: First he decimates your will to compete, then he decimates you on the scoreboard—just like the other two. Between the three of them, they have 128 goals this calendar year.

That's just preposterous.

But the questions they and their team-mates are posing are not. Has anyone ever played like this? Has anyone ever taken excellence in performance and artistry this far? Has anyone been to where they're on track to go?

Anyone?

Tentatively, I want to say no—no one has. But then, like many of you, I haven't been able to do comparisons with my own eyes. I'm too young to have seen the 1970 Brazil team, or the Total Football of the Dutch soon after. Or the European march of Real Madrid in the 1950s and '60s. I never saw Pele live, either. Or Diego Maradona. Or Alfredo Di Stefano. Or Johan Cruyff. 

But did those men and those teams play like this?

Paul White/Associated Press

When you think about great athletes and great sides, particularly modern ones, it's very easy for the images in your mind to slip into montage form.

When picturing Usain Bolt, for instance, you're often taken to a scene backed by one of those epic, Olympic overtures, small pauses allowing for the starter's gun and the crossing-the-line sound bite to be heard. When the focus is a great NBA team, you picture it slowed down, black-and-white, with metronomic beats capturing the explosive nature of the beauty. When it's racing, you picture something more thunderous; when it's football, something more graceful. 

And yet, for this Barcelona, it's easy to picture nothing at all, "nothing" in this case meaning nothing else—just as they are, at normal speed and in normal colour but in absolute silence. It's as if they've reached a point where the sensations they give you can't be enhanced by music or slow-motion footage or clever video editing. 

I've watched countless sports from all over the world for longer than I can remember, but I can't recall a visual experience like this one from Barcelona. 

That counts for a hell of a lot when you start discussing global impact, imprints on history, legacies.

Unmatched ones.

And that's before you consider the raw achievements that are possible.

This month, the Catalans will contest the Club World Cup, bidding to win the competition for a third time. That's never been done. When they return, a 28th Copa del Rey title will be their next target—a domestic cup tally that would eclipse that of any other club from Europe's major countries.

Then it's La Liga, where Barcelona are gunning for their sixth title in eight years, which is something that hasn't been done for almost half a century. Then it's the Champions League, where what they could be going for is unprecedented.  

But it's not just the fact that they could achieve such feats; it's how. The manner in which it's possible. Inescapably, this has become the game's most dominant storyline, the one that truly matters, rendering every other football question almost insignificant in comparison. 

This is bigger. This is about something else. How far can this go?

If it goes as far as many believe it can, you will never, ever, ever stop talking about this team. 

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