With 28 goals in all competitions this season, his Barcelona team top of LaLiga, powering past Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League and with a Copa del Rey final to look forward to, Raphinha is eyeing a treble – and is the favourite for the Ballon d’Or.
His goal and two assists against Dortmund in the first leg of that quarter-final took Raphinha to 19 goal contributions in the competition in this campaign – matching Lionel’s Messi best effort. It is an astonishing transformation for the 28-year-old Brazilian.
After two relatively underwhelming seasons, he was linked with a move to Saudi Arabia. But something has clicked. With Robert Lewandowski creating space and Lamine Yamal picking him out, Raphinha has been the willing runner, finding joy from the left.
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Raphinha stands alone as the top scorer in the Champions League this season
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His Barcelona blossoming has been one of the stories of the season, all the more remarkable in this era of precocious talents who arrive on the scene seemingly fully formed. Peruse that list of Ballon d’Or candidates and most of the others were teenage sensations.
Raphinha’s own route to the top has been less linear. Consider, for example, that it was only three years ago that he was there celebrating with the Leeds supporters in the away end at Brentford having helped the club to escape relegation under Jesse Marsch.
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Raphinha celebrates with the Leeds United supporters at Brentford
The story of how he became a Premier League player is serendipitous in itself. In 2020, Marcelo Bielsa, the then Leeds boss, was not even scouting Raphinha when he was shown the video of a game between Nice and Rennes. He was looking for a new left-back.
“That was a little bit of a problem position for us,” Andres Clavijo tells Sky Sports. You may remember Clavijo as Bielsa’s translator but in truth his role was much broader than that, working as an analyst for the coach, with a particular specialism in French football.
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Raphinha impressed Marcelo Bielsa during his season with Rennes in France
“I did a video of Nice versus Rennes and Raphinha absolutely tore the Nice left-back to shreds. Marcelo saw it and said to me, ‘Who is this player?’ I said, ‘That is Raphinha, he has had an unbelievable season, helping Rennes to qualify for the Champions League.’
“I remember saying to him, ‘He is probably way out of our budget because I am sure they will not let him go for anything less than £30m after the season he has had.’ They had just bought him from Sporting the season before for around £20m.
“But I think Marcelo then contacted [director of football] Victor [Orta]. Victor reached out to Rennes and they said it was impossible but it came about in the last couple of days of the window. It was crazy that we pulled that off. We could not believe our luck.”
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Marcelo Bielsa and Raphinha in conversation during their time at Leeds United
Raphinha was a revelation at Leeds, adapting quickly to life in the Premier League – and, crucially, life under Bielsa. “He is by far the best player that I have had the pleasure of being around. He is crazy talented but his work ethic is unbelievable,” says Clavijo.
“From the first day, he was just incredible in training. If you talk to any of the boys that were there at the time, they will tell you how good he was in training. He was just on a different level to everybody else. But the work rate is really what surprised everybody.
“His physical numbers were out of this world. It was just incredible.” Indeed, during his debut season as a Premier League player, his only full season under Bielsa, Raphinha made 715 sprints, the most by any winger that year, despite missing eight matches.
Factor in all positions and Raphinha made over 10 per cent more sprints than any other Premier League regular that season, one that was played without supporters inside the stadium. His motivation was intrinsic, albeit with a little encouragement from his coach.
“That is why he blended in so well with the way Marcelo wanted to play. If you look through Marcelo’s teams, if you don’t work then you are not really going to play. He had that work rate in abundance and also the ability that no other player on that team had.”
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Raphinha made the most sprints per 90 minutes of any player in the Premier League
Clavijo describes it as “absolutely crazy” to think that he was working with a future Ballon d’Or candidate at newly-promoted Leeds, but maybe he should have checked in with Diogo Fernandes, the coach at Avai, the Brazilian club where Raphinha started out.
Speaking to Fernandes when Raphinha was still at Leeds, his prediction for the player’s rise now appears prophetic. “I always told people he was the best I had worked with. I said that he would go on to play for Barcelona or another of the top clubs in Europe.”
Fernandes tells some great tales of the young Raphinha. He would often catch the ball during training when a pass to him had been overhit. “In order to prevent it from running away too far and having to go and fetch it because our training ground was very open.”
Not a problem until he repeated it during a game against Inter in the Copa Rio Grande do Sul. Raphinha had already been booked. “He automatically just reached out with his hand to stop it. Of course, they gave him a second yellow card and he was sent off.”
Then, there was the time that he was incensed because a bookable offence had been committed not by him but by a team-mate and began remonstrating with the referee. A little awkward when his team-mate was already on a yellow card and he was not.
That might just resonate with Barcelona supporters who witnessed Raphinha lunge at the ball on the line to nick a goal from Pau Cubarsi in that 4-0 win over Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League quarter-final first leg. Let’s call it ruthless singlemindedness.
“He was extremely competitive, explosive even. He always wanted to be the best. He was destined to reach the highest echelons of football because of his qualities, his dribbling ability, his intelligence, and his finishing. He was almost complete.”
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Raphinha made the move to Europe to play for Vitoria Guimaraes in Portugal
Almost complete, insists Fernandes. But when Raphinha arrived in Europe it was not to join one of the continent’s super clubs. He moved to Vitoria Guimaraes in Portugal and found himself in the B team coached by Vitor Campelos – with plenty still left to learn.
“He arrived from Brazil and he played his own way,” Campelos tells Sky Sports. “Football is different there, not so tactically developed. We started to show him where he must be as a winger.” A lot of work went into it but throughout it all Raphinha was eager to improve.
“He always wanted to learn more. Always he would ask me, ‘What do you think about this? Okay, so if the ball is there, where must I be now?’ I was a little stubborn with him about the positioning of the body and the positioning of the feet to receive the ball.”
In this context, Raphinha’s continued evolution as a player is a little less surprising. Fuse talent with an unquenchable appetite and big things can happen. “One good thing that he had was a big commitment to the team and the other players,” says Campelos.
“We saw that immediately when he started working with us. Those small details, even when we were doing some simple passing exercises in training, he always tried to do them at the maximum intensity, in the right way, because he is a worker, a professional.
“I remember sometimes his father watched training. We felt that he wanted to be something in football. He wanted to be someone and wanted to reach a high level. So he had this in his head from the start. He wanted to play in big teams, to play for Brazil.”
That was a still a long way off in 2016 when Raphinha was just a teenager, but for all the details that Campelos worked to instil in him, there was a key aspect of his game already in place. The finishing ability that is obvious now, was a strength back then too.
“From the start, his shooting accuracy was very strong when one against one with the goalkeeper. It was unusual. He would score maybe nine out of 10.” Helpfully, in LaLiga this season, Raphinha has had more than twice as many one-on-ones as anyone else.
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If Campelos honed the talent, Pedro Martins unleashed it. He was the head coach who gave Raphinha his senior debut in European club football with Vitoria. “When he was in the second team, he was starting our pre-season and I said, ‘You will stay with me.'”
Speaking to Martins about his former player, it is clear that he did not want to stifle him too much. “Raphinha was different. These kind of players, they change the game totally because they do things differently. Sometimes it can create chaos in the game.”
The experienced Portuguese coach continued: “His game, it will always be anarchic, but you need that bit of anarchy in a team. This kind of fire you cannot put out. It is a better to play a little bit more for the team, but we cannot take this out of them.
“His commitment was amazing. He was fighting to win balls, not just waiting for it, really showing solidarity with the other players. He has a big heart. My question was whether he would improve and develop his game for the team or remain this anarchic player.”
Martins talks of being “sure we could sell him to one of the big Portuguese clubs” and that is what happened, Raphinha moving on to Sporting after two seasons in the Vitoria starting line-up. From there came the move to Rennes, an important step for him.
“I think France was very good for his game understanding. And now at Barcelona, you need to adapt to their philosophy because if you do not adapt then you cannot play there. So he has adapted and I understand he is more mature and playing for the team.”
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Raphinha’s numbers for Barcelona this season highlight this spectacularly. Yes, he took that goal from Cubarsi against Dortmund, but while he is the Champions League top scorer, he actually ranks higher for assists than goals in LaLiga this season.
Indeed, Raphinha has created more chances from open play in the competition than anyone else. Decisive in possession but determined without it, he has become an all-round player at Barcelona. “He is 28 now so he is more mature,” notes Campelos.
What is fascinating is that it took until the third season at the club for him to truly flourish. Not everyone is afforded so much time at Barcelona. The reason for his transformation is partly due to a change of role that plays to Raphinha’s strengths.
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Raphinha has changed his position for Barcelona this season and is flourishing
“He can play in any of the [forward] positions,” says Campelos. But Raphinha was restricted to the right for much of his first two years in Catalonia. Now playing from the left, while being encouraged to make central runs in behind, he is a different animal.
From the left, he can both score and create. The result is that as well as supplying his striker, he has already scored as many goals in LaLiga this season as his first two seasons combined. Clavijo, the man whose video helped set him on this path, is not shocked.
“The fact that he is playing on the left, it is not a real surprise. He did not do it too much at Leeds, but when he was at Rennes, he played on that side quite often. Even in training at Leeds, you could just see that he was so good, he could play absolutely anywhere.”
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Shot map of Raphinha for Barcelona in this season’s Champions League
Clavijo adds: “I had no doubt that he would come good. The move was obviously a very big step up with the expectation and pressure. But I knew that once he got going, once he settled and could relax and be himself, he would prove to be a very, shrewd signing.”
Martins talks of his pride in Raphinha now, while Campelos takes pleasure in the potential being realised. “He is a hard worker so I thought he could achieve a high level but I never imagined that he could be the captain of Barcelona,” says his old coach.
In fact, Raphinha is one of five captains at Barca, part of the leadership group at the club, not necessarily wearing the armband but significant nevertheless – Lewandowski, for example, is not among the five. It is another reason for his growth this season.
Growth that could yet culminate in the Ballon d’Or.
