Barcelona’s autumn has found an unlikely centre-forward in Raphinha. The 29-year-old from Porto Alegre arrived in Catalonia in 2022 as a right-sided winger, shifted to the left when Lamine Yamal made the opposite flank his own, and has now moved through the middle to become Hansi Flick’s principal answer after the exits of Robert Lewandowski and Ferran Torres and the club’s unsuccessful pursuit of Julián Álvarez.
His new role was underlined in Sevilla, where Raphinha scored a perfect hat-trick and pushed his Liga total to 12 goals from the opening seven rounds. It was a fitting way to mark an agreement to extend his Barcelona stay by two further years, taking his contract through June 2030.
The scoring start has carried him beyond Lionel Messi’s best seven-match opening in the competition. Messi reached 11 goals at the same stage of the 2017-18 campaign; Raphinha has already gone one better. His 12-goal return also matches the starts made by Mariano Martín for Barcelona, Pruden for Atlético de Madrid in 1940-41, Sevilla’s Campanal in that same season, and Quini with Sporting in 1979-80.
Only two players have begun a Spanish top-flight season more forcefully through seven fixtures. Echevarría struck 14 times for Oviedo, while Cristiano Ronaldo had 13 in 2014-15. Ronaldo went on to reach 16 after eight matches that season, leaving Raphinha needing four against Getafe at Spotify Camp Nou on 10 October if he is to draw level with that mark.
A striker’s numbers in Barcelona
Before returning to Catalonia, Raphinha will join Brazil for exhibition matches in Australia and India. On his return, Getafe will offer more than a routine post-international-break assignment. Another hat-trick would give him three in succession, a sequence neither Messi nor Luis Suárez managed despite Messi recording two hat-tricks in this run of games and Suárez one. It would instead bring Raphinha alongside the historical streaks achieved by Langara with Oviedo in 1934-35 and Zarra for Athletic Club in 1946-47.
His efficiency has been as striking as his volume. Across Barcelona’s season so far, including the Champions League meeting with Feyenoord, Raphinha has taken 22 shots. Only one has missed the target, two have hit the woodwork, and 19 have been on target; 14 of those attempts have ended in goals.
Those are returns more commonly associated with specialist No. 9s such as Romário, Ronaldo, Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Suárez, Lewandowski, Erling Haaland or Harry Kane. For Barcelona, though, the significance is more immediate: a winger signed to work from the outside has become Flick’s central reference point, and the most decisive figure in the club’s early Liga campaign.
