FC Barcelona: A New Era Season 2 Review – Can Barca return to the height of Spanish football?

Episode Guide

Enthusiasm
Doubts
Bubble
New Era

Barcelona are a club steeped in history. The Nou Camp is an intimidating stadium and for anyone who has been privileged to visit, they’ll tell you that the cauldron has a raw, unwieldy energy that throws most teams that come to play there, completely off their guard.

In recent years though, that cauldron hasn’t quite conjured the alluring spells you’d expect. Barcelona has fallen from the lofty heights of old. They’ve struggled to win the La Liga, they’ve been dumped out the Champions League multiple times, and off-field scandals have soured their reputation. Like any giant of football, it’s only a matter of time before that wounded behemoth recovers and comes back fighting. Can that be the case for the 2022/2023 season?

Season 2 of FC Barcelona: A New Era collates 4 more episodes capturing all the highs and lows of last year’s footballing calendar. With Xavi now in as the full-time boss, and new signing Lewandowski fronting the striker gallery, the episodes capture the season in full, with plenty of highlights along the way,

It’s worth noting that the dubbing on Amazon Prime is absolutely atrocious. The show doesn’t tell you this, but the original language is in Spanish not English, so it’s highly, highly recommended that you switch to Espanol and add in English subtitles.

With that cleared up, the episodes add a number of interviews with different players, discussing their feelings on certain matches. Hearing Lewandowski mention how he felt a little conflicted playing against Bayern Munich in the Champions League for example, or Ter Stegen admitting that against Manchester United they simply weren’t good enough second half, are revealing statements and add some much-needed depth and reflection to this series.

In terms of narrative, each episode focuses on one or two players and dives into their mindset and how far they’ve come in the Barcelona team. It’s a tactic that the All or Nothing series uses too, and it works to good effect here. However, there is a tendency to blame the referees constantly when decisions don’t go their way, both in La Liga and the Champions League. This is something backed up by the commentary team too. In fairness, the match with Inter Milan was an absolute shocker, but others not so much.

It’s rather ironic in a way, given the underlying Barca scandal with the Negreira case. For those unaware, this surrounds serious accusations levelled against the club for making payments to referees in previous seasons for favourable on-field decisions. The preview at the end of episode 2 teases that this series going to actually tackle and explore this, but beyond one or two mentions of it, it’s swept under the rug and forgotten about.

Despite that though, if you’re a football fan or have supported Barca over the years, this documentary series is certainly worth a watch. At only four episodes it’s very easy to binge through, given the short episode run-time, and there’s plenty of footballing highlights and revealing interviews along the way.

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