Barcelona – Levante

The champion Barcelona will host Levante at the Camp Nou in a game from the 22th round of La Liga this Sunday.

Because of their defeat against Valencia in the previous round, which was Quique Setien’s first loss with the Catalans, Barca are now second in La Liga. They are three points behind the new leader Real Madrid. This means that for Barcelona there’s no time to slow down now.

During the week Setien celebrated his biggest win since his arrival in Barcelona. His team met Leganes in the Copa del Rey and celebrated a big 5-0 win. Lionel Messi scored a brace and celebrated his 500th win with the club, while Antoine Griezmann, Clement Lenglet and Arthur Melo also put the ball in the net. For this game Quique Setien called up the youngster Alex Collado, but he didn’t get any minutes.

Barcelona will hope that Real Madrid will make a mistake in the capital derby against Atletico Madrid on Saturday.

In the same time Levante are in a pretty bad run at the moment because they lost their last three matches in La Liga. In the previous round Paco Lopez’ boys met Osasuna at the El Sadar, but suffered a 0-2 loss. Levante were actually close to winning a point from this game, but the Pamplonians scored their two goals in the last 9 minutes of the fixture.

Levante will travel to the Camp Nou without some players that are missing. Oier, Rober and Enis Bardhi are all sidelined with injures and not avaliable for selection by Paco Lopez.

We expect to see Barcelona dominating Levante on Sunday. Los Cules can’t afford any mistakes at the moment. They are playing at home and Levante are not in their best shape, so we think Setien’s team will take the three points here.