May the Champions League not prevent you from celebrating the League

Not even the most optimistic culers would have predicted at the start of the season that Barça would be nine points ahead of Madrid with only seven matchdays left in the League. The blaugrana lead is highly commendable, considering the long-term injuries of key players, the team's youth, and the historical proportion of players who have come up from La Masia and fill the lineups every week. Economic necessity forced them to look for sporting virtue at home, and indeed, Barça has found it.

And it is even more commendable if we consider that Barça is fighting for the championship with a Madrid built on multi-million euro contracts, but having sacked the coach who was finally going to give them a playing style, and with no other sporting project than to rely on the stars and desperately win the Champions League because in other competitions (like the Super Cup, which Barça won against them in the final) they have been far below expectations.

Barça has a do-or-die Champions League match tomorrow, curiously against a team that is twenty-two points below them in the standings. Certainly, winning the Champions League is the pending challenge for a Barça that has not won it since 2015, and everything suggests that Lamine Yamal's generation is destined to lift the European Cup. Last year they were close to the final, but we all understood that they still had to go through some more tough times to achieve it. This year, and after the 0-2 from Atlético de Madrid at the Camp Nou, Barça will have to perform a miracle. Who knows, because this is football, and this team is Barça. But whatever happens tomorrow in the Champions League, let's not fall into the biased interpretation that winning the League has less value if the "big ears" are not lifted.