Barça Begin Their Season. Adeyemi Is Already Expected to Save the Project

Barcelona will play their first friendly of the English training camp tonight. Hansi Flick’s team face Birmingham City at 8:45 p.m. CEST at St. Andrew’s, a stadium opened in 1906 with a capacity of just under 30,000. The perfect setting to launch another season filled with ambitious plans, grand presentations and a carefully avoided conversation about the club’s finances.

Most of the attention will be on Karim Adeyemi. “Mundo Deportivo” reports that the German winger is expected to make his Barcelona debut tonight. He did not feature in the previous behind-closed-doors friendly, so this will be his first chance to learn the rules of life at Barça: one successful run makes you the new Neymar, while one quiet half immediately starts a debate about whether the transfer was a mistake.

For Flick, the match will mainly be an opportunity to assess players returning to full fitness and the youngsters completing the squad while several World Cup participants remain unavailable. For Barcelona, it will be the first opportunity to declare the birth of another great project on the evidence of a preseason friendly. Nottingham Forest and a tournament involving Udinese will come next — more than enough material to announce that every problem was solved before August.

The game will be shown on Barça Play and Barcelona’s premium YouTube channel. The first team will also wear the Barça Foundation logo on the back of their shirts for the first time. A potentially historic evening, then — even if the moment everyone remembers is simply Adeyemi completing his first successful dribble against Birmingham City.