The scorelines were the easy part of the week

The worry about Lamine Yamal lasted until the ball sat up for him on the edge of the Rayo area. He hit it into the top corner, and became the youngest player in the club's history to reach fifty first-team goals. He added a second near the end, that one taken with control instead of force. Two quiet league matches stopped being a subject.

The first goal Barça conceded came from an opponent running into the space their control is supposed to remove.

The answer was needed, because Rayo had scored first: Rayo's Álvaro García got away down the left, Sergio Camello arrived ahead of Christensen, and the first goal Barça have conceded in the league this season came from an opponent running into the space their control is supposed to remove. Raphinha levelled, Lamine put Barça in front almost immediately, and the evening went back to the expected shape.

The second half went both ways inside ten minutes. Gordon was released six minutes after the break and his low ball across goal was turned into his own net by the Rayo defender Lejeune. Camello then met a corner at the near post and pulled a comfortable lead back into a contest. Barça had too much attack for it: Raphinha matched Lamine's brace, Pedri kept starting the next possession before Rayo could arrange themselves, and it finished 5–2.

None of this is a problem while the attack keeps scoring five, but Rayo will not be the last side invited into that space, and Barça will not always have five goals available to cover it.

Losing Alexia Putellas, Mapi León, Ona Batlle and Salma Paralluelo inside a single summer usually invites a certain kind of window, and Barça did not have one. What they had against Tenerife was a promotion list. Lúa Arufe started at left-back for her Liga F debut, a winger moved back down the pitch because that is where the squad needed her. With the match already gone, Elena Vizuete, Carolina Ferrera and Mayssa Baha came on for their official first-team debuts. Vizuete belongs to the 2010 generation and has reached the first team without playing for the reserves, and Mayssa Baha is fifteen years old.

Barça answered four departures with four debuts, and one of the debutants is fifteen years old.

The senior players made it a soft place to land. Caroline Graham Hansen and Clàudia Pina had the match under control early, Ewa Pajor scored after the break and Irene Paredes closed it out. Renee van Asten marked her official debut with a goal, and Kerolin, signed from Manchester City in the summer, took her first Liga F minutes from the bench. It finished 5–0, a manita that meant nobody had to be carried through it.

Tenerife were overmatched, so beating them settles nothing about who replaces Alexia. It does say something about the method. Pere Romeu, the head coach, is not going to the market for one replacement per departure. He is spreading the responsibility across the players who stayed and pulling forward the ones who were supposed to wait another year or two. Sevilla away will start to tell you whether that is conviction or the only option on the table.

The striker hunt spent the summer pointed at Julián Álvarez, and it did not end because Barça found someone better. It ended because Atlético refused to sell, and then said so in public.

The two clubs end the window further apart than they started it.

Gabriel Jesus has signed for three seasons, and ESPN put the initial fee at €10 million with add-ons to follow. The reasons the price sits there are not a secret. Jesus had fallen behind Kai Havertz and Viktor Gyökeres at Arsenal, he has spent too much of the last few seasons injured, and nobody at the club is presenting him as a starter, which is as far as the evidence should carry it. What he gives Flick is a job description rather than a solution: press first, come to the ball, drag a centre-back into a channel, and let Raphinha stay through the middle or go back to the left.

That does not close the Álvarez file. FootballTransfers, relaying Fabrizio Romano, reported on the day Jesus was announced that Álvarez had turned Arsenal down outright and stayed set on Barcelona for whenever it becomes possible. Atlético's board had already voted unanimously not to negotiate, saying in a statement that Barça failed to meet professional and ethical standards and that there is “zero consideration of an Alvarez transfer to Barcelona”.

So the two clubs end the window further apart than they started it, with the player Barça want sitting in Madrid refusing to go anywhere else. The Spanish window reopens on 2 January. Ten million on a forward who can do a job now is what keeps that option affordable, which is either patience or a tidy story told after a failed pursuit.

Barça meant to honour the eight players who won the World Cup with Spain before the Athletic match, and then called it off. Days earlier, outside Elche's Martínez Valero, police had confiscated Esteladas, the starred flag of Catalan independence, and used force while detaining a young culer. The club's statement called the police response disproportionate, backed the supporter and his family, and defended the Estelada as legal political expression. Athletic were then received at Camp Nou beneath thousands of them, distributed outside the ground.

The club chose the obligation closer to home.

That history is not new, and it goes back a long way. A century ago Les Corts, the ground Barça played in before Camp Nou, was closed after supporters jeered the Spanish anthem, and Joan Gamper, who founded the club, was made to give up his role for good. Through the dictatorship and the transition, the ground was where Catalan identity could be expressed at full volume. The politics have changed; the refusal to leave them outside has not. That does not make the decision automatically right. The champions earned their moment and none of them had anything to do with what happened at Elche. But holding the ceremony would have asked Barça to celebrate Spain in the same week one of its own members was treated that way outside a stadium. The club chose the obligation closer to home.

Raphinha is twenty-nine, and against Athletic that made him the oldest player Barça started. Everyone else in the eleven was born this century. It was the youngest side the club have fielded at Camp Nou, which is normally a fact that arrives with a warning attached.

The first team did not introduce them to each other so much as reunite them.

The warning does not really apply, because of the year on four of those birth certificates. Lamine Yamal, Pau Cubarsí, Marc Bernal and Xavi Espart were all born in 2007 and all came up through the same La Masia teams under Arnau Blanco, who now works on Flick's staff. The first team did not introduce them to each other so much as reunite them.

Cubarsí has travelled furthest without ever looking like he is moving. He played every minute of Spain's World Cup win, was named the tournament's best young player, and now leads the Golden Boy performance index, with Lamine immediately behind him and ineligible to collect an award he already has.

That is why the Athletic team sheet felt less experimental than its average age suggested. Espart, Bernal, Cubarsí and Lamine were not four teenagers each solving first-team football on their own. They were most of an old team, playing at a higher level. Raphinha supplied the senior voice and the opening goal. The rest of it already belonged to them.