Xavi Hernández has already matched Carlo Ancelotti. The Spanish technical Nobel Prize winner has been able to score the same points in LaLiga as the veteran Italian coach. Both have 93 points, neither one more nor one less. Since the arrival of Xavi Hernández, in the month of November 2021, until now, Barcelona has added 93 points in the championship in a total of 42 days. The victory this Sunday against Atlético de Madrid, added to the defeat of Real Madrid in Villarreal, has allowed Xavi to definitively reach Ancelotti in his particular pulse.
It has not been an easy road for the Egarense coach: he landed with the team in ninth position, eleven points behind the then leader, Real Sociedad, and ten behind Real Madrid. The team, which had 17 points in 12 games, was mired in a depression of play and results. Xavi knew how to reverse the situation until he climbed eight positions, and finished second, with 73 points, thirteen less than Real Madrid, who took the championship with authority. When the 2021/22 season ended, Ancelotti had added three more points than Xavi: Real Madrid reached 59 points to 56 for FC Barcelona.
However, this season it was soon seen that Barcelona was going to take LaLiga very seriously. On matchday seven, after beating Mallorca 0-1, they rose to the top, a position they maintained a matchday later, beating Celta (1-0). However, on matchday 9, the defeat at the Bernabéu (3-1) once again knocked them out of the lead, recovering it four games later, with the home win against Almería (2-0) and Real Madrid’s defeat against Lightning (3-2). From here, no one has lowered him from the throne, consuming the greatest difference in points this same day.
These three points that separate him from Real Madrid serve to wash away the three points he lost last year against Ancelotti, for which he has managed to score the same score in LaLiga as Real Madrid. And if we compare with other teams, the difference between Xavi’s Barça is already literally abysmal: they have added 18 more points than Simeone’s Atlético, 21 more than Pellegrini’s Betis, 35 more than Sevilla and 43 more than Valencia.
Ancelotti’s Madrid can only boast of scoring even more goals than Xavi’s Barça: the whites have 88 goals against 84 for the blaugrana, since in goals against, the Catalan team has better numbers, with only 29 goals, for 34 for the madridistas. In fact, the final balance today would be one goal ahead in favor of Real Madrid in the general ‘goal average’.