From Barça to the Bay: Bidding Farewell to a Blaugrana Great
On the sudden, if not altogether surprising departure from Barcelona of an era-defining great, Asisat Oshoala
A few days ago, for reasons that now elude me, I wound up on Barça Femení’s Wikipedia page. Scrolling around, I happened upon the page’s “Current Squad” section and, for the first time, well, ever (for me), I didn’t see the name “Asisat Oshoala.”
Rationally, this makes perfect sense. It’s been a month since news broke that Oshoala was departing FC Barcelona to join the NWSL’s latest expansion team, Bay FC. There’s been subsequent confirmation of the deal’s completion. This all tracks. It’s still disorienting to peruse this roster and not see her name.
Equally strange is the lack of fanfare with which the now six-time African Women’s Player of the Year departed. This is, after all, the greatest-ever African women’s player, one of Europe’s preeminent attackers over the past half-decade, and a bona fide Barça great. From the moment she arrived in Catalunya in January 2019 on loan from Chinese club Dalian Quanjian - whom she’d joined after a brief spell with Arsenal, after a brief spell with Liverpool, whom she’d joined after starting her career in her native Nigeria - the three-time Women's Africa Cup of Nations (WAFCON) champion and U-20 Women’s World Cup Golden Boot and Golden Ball winner (2014) was a force to be (usually unsuccessfully) reckoned with.
Busting on the Barça Scene
In that first half-season, she made ten appearances for Barça, scoring eight goals, including seven in seven league outings. From there, it was off to the races. In her first full league campaign, she netted 20 in 19 appearances. She was somehow more prolific in helping Barça to the Supercopa de España and Copa de la Reina, with seven goals in four appearances in the two competitions.
The 2020-21 season was Ohshoala’s least efficient (lol) with the Blaugrana, as she tallied “just” 18 goals (and a then-career-high three assists) in 26 league matches. No one will ever refer to it thusly, of course, as Barça Femení cruised to the league title, the Copa de la Reina, and, thanks in part to Oshoala’s four goals in nine appearances, the Champions League, making FC Barcelona the first (and still only) club with men’s and women’s European trebles, and Oshoala the first African woman ever to win the Champions League.
And so it’s gone.
In 2021-22, for the second time in three seasons, she notched 20 goals in 19 league matches - this time good for a share of the Pichichi - and a new career-high four assists as Barça cruised to a third straight league crown. For her trouble, Oshoala was named to the short list of Ballon d’Or Féminin finalists and finished 16th in the voting.
She was everything one could hope for in a striker - intelligent yet instinctive, fast, powerful, explosive, aggressive, and incisive. Somewhere along the way, though, the unimpeachable top-tier superstar status befitting her individual productivity and awesome team success… never quite arrived.
The Barça side she joined was headlined by Alexia at (or approaching) her all-encompassing peak. There was no messing with that. Those early sides also featured one of the great goal scorers in the history of the women’s game, five-time Pichichi Jenni Hermoso, and Lieke Martens, the 2017 FIFA, UEFA, and IFFHS Women’s Player of the Year, in the midst of a Ballon d’Or shortlist three-peat.
Her greatest concentration of decisive performances - the second in a 2-0 away win in Sevilla, the lone goal in a 1-0 away win at Huelva a week later, the first two in a 4-0 away win over Madrid CFF, the first and last in a 3-0 win in Bilbao, four in a 6-0 away drubbing of Real Madrid six days later, the winner (it gave Barça a 3-1 lead at the time) in a 3-2 away win over Atlético de Madrid - came alongside that superstar trio in the 2019-20 season. Those contributions helped Barça to a first league title in four years - that it came by just nine points over Atleti magnifies their significance.
Ever since, while the team enjoyed an obscene run of success in which Oshoala played a major role, it seemed like circumstance conspired to steer her clear of the full recognition (to the extent that she wants it; there’s no indication that she actually craves this) she so deserves.
Arguably her defining performance since the ‘19-’20 season came in a home clash with Arsenal in the 2021-22 Champions League group stage.
She asks one of the night’s early questions with a 12-yard attempt across the box from the right, past Arsenal keeper Manuela Zinsberger, just wide of the far post. Twenty minutes later, she facilitates the opener, nabbing an assist after Zinsberger spills her 20-yard rocket into the path of an onrushing Mariona:
Five minutes after that she hits the side of the net after a powerful run down the right wing. About six minutes after that (in the 43rd), she caps a near-identical dribble drive down the right with a slick pull-back in front of goal to Alexia. 2-0. Then, less than two minutes after the break, Mariona slices open the Arsenal defense with a gorgeous through ball that finds Oshoala’s perfectly timed run. 3-0. Ball game.
Sadly, this dominant performance is essentially already lost to history. Oshoala was, unfortunately, unable to feature on those two magical nights at Camp Nou - she was out injured for the quarterfinal against Madrid and made an 18-minute cameo in her first match back in the semifinal first leg win over Wolfsburg - and the campaign ended in tears in the Champions League final, at the hands of Lyon, for a second time in three years.
That summer, with Alexia on the shelf with an ACL injury and Hermoso and Martens departing for, respectively, Mexico and Paris, Oshoala’s path to true headliner status was theoretically clear. This time, despite her continued prolificacy, her star was once again eclipsed by Ballon d’Or-to-be Aitana Bonmatí, Caroline Graham Hansen, Mapi León, and newcomer Salma Paralluelo. In this vein, ever since that night at the Johan against Arsenal, this team’s most memorable and decisive goals have been authored by Aitana, Clàudia Pina, CGH, Patri, and Fridolina Rolfö, while much of Oshoala’s best work, including several “winning goals,” have gotten buried in the 6-, 7-, 8-0 deluges that are this team’s calling card.
Then came last season.
The More Things Stay the Same, the More They Change
At the time, I described the frequency with which Oshoala found herself during the 2022-23 season in positions in which a goal could pretty safely be assumed as “genuinely crazy.” The very next sentence, however, ends” “... it’s similarly wild how many of these opportunities that begin with Oshoala staring down a helpless goalkeeper, often in isolation, end with the ball either smashing off of the keeper or trickling wide of the net.”
Mind you, the “down season” in question was still one in which Oshoala notched 21 goals and three assists in 28 league matches and another five goals and three assists in Champions League nine outings. Nothing crazy. Pretty awesome, but hardly crazy.
While the “how many” was perfectly fine, the “how” was a bit off. Consult the numbers and they’ll tell you that she underperformed her xG (per FBRef) in the league and the Champions League by two goals each. Fair enough. Still, though, 26 freaking goals.
What’s weird is the extent to which the season was guided by an incandescent half-dozen matches out of 37 and not Oshoala’s characteristic metronomic consistency. Of her 32 2022-23 goals/assists, eleven came in a bonkers four-match run in January and February, during which she notched hat tricks against Levante Las Planas, UD Tenerife, and (in just 32 minutes!) Real Betis, with a goal and an assist in the first 15 minutes of a 4-0 win in Valencia sandwiched in between. Another six (four goals, two assists) had come a couple of months before, in Barça’s Champions League group stage openers against Benfica and Rosengård.
The fan support at home games (I was at every one) never waned. Neither did (by all available accounts and my own amateur body language analysis) that of her teammates and coaches. There was, however, a shift in the vibe accompanying every 1v1 or gilt-edged touch in the box, from a pre-celebratory buzz to anxiety. Even with Oshoala at barely 29 years of age, it was tough to shake the notion that a cycle was winding down rather than ramping up.
Asisat Oshoala and the Blaugrana Pantheon
If it seems as though I’m eulogizing Asist Oshoala’s career (or at least the portion of it where she’s a frontline star), I apologize. My objective, in fact, is the opposite.
That an “inefficient” and often exasperating season for Oshoala still yielded 26 goals, six assists, a fourth straight league title, a second Champions League triumph in three years, and another top-20 Ballon d’Or finish is a testament to the outlandish standard that she’s set. Shit, even this season, she was good for seven goals in 11 league and Champions League matches!
In total, she netted 117 times in 157 appearances in all competitions, including a ridiculous 94 in 108 in league play. This places her behind only 14 players - 11 greats of the men’s game, and Sonia Bermúdez (123), Jenni Hermoso (181), and Alexia (184) on the women’s side.
Even with the eye test hinting at cause for concern, her gift for identifying an opportunity never faltered. Neither did her awesome vision, intelligence, explosiveness, and aggressiveness. Oshoala remains a constant threat. That this somehow works against her rather than emphatically highlighting her place among the world’s elite strikers, again, speaks to the standard she’s set.
Oshoala departs Europe, along with also-Stateside-bound manager Jonatan Giráldez, goalkeeping great Sandra Paños, and maybe others in what could be an evolutionary moment for Barça Femení. She does so as the CAF’s (Confederation of African Football) Best Woman Player of the Decade (2011–2020), an FA Cup winner (2015-16 with Arsenal), a four-time Liga F champion, a four-time Supercopa de España Femenina winner, a three-time Copa de la Reina winner, a two-time Champions League winner, and a pioneering ambassador for the future of the women’s game, in her native Nigeria and beyond.
Not unlike the greatest African men’s player in club history, Samuel Eto’o, whose star never outshone those of teammates Ronaldinho, Xavi, Iniesta, Puyol, and Messi despite his leaving Barcelona as a treble-winner and the club’s third-leading scorer of all time (130; now fifth among men’s players and seventh overall), Oshoala departs with a permanent place in the Barça pantheon - one whose enduring impact will only be amplified with time.
So… Where Exactly Is Oshoala Going, Again?
Due to kick off its inaugural season on March 17 against Angel City FC, Bay FC (along with the Utah Royals) brings the total number of sides currently competing in the NWSL to fourteen.
The efforts that brought Bay FC into existence started with four ex-USWNT players - Brandi Chastain, Leslie Osborne, Danielle Slaton, and Aly Wagner - founding "NWSL to the Bay," a lobbying group aimed at securing an NWSL expansion franchise for the San Francisco Bay Area. The April 2023 announcement of the franchise’s formation came with the disclosure that Bay FC’s majority owner would be Sixth Street Partners. (Sound familiar? This is the firm that acquired 25% of FC Barcelona's TV income over the next 25 years and facilitated Joan Laporta’s access to his beloved “financial levers.”)
Bay FC holds the distinction of being the first U.S.-based professional sports team majority-owned by an institutional investor. There was an initial (rightful) concern that private equity’s long-term commitment to a startup sports franchise might be somewhat flimsy.
Potentially mitigating these concerns was the fact that the team was funded from Sixth Street’s $1 billion Tao Partners - through which Sixth Street also acquired a 20% stake in the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs in 2021 - a balance sheet fund with no target hold period or mandatory liquidation deadlines (as most PE funds and investments have). There’s also Sixth Street CEO Alan Waxman’s verbal commitment to owning the franchise for at least 10 years.
The franchise’s founding board members include Chastain, Osborne, Slaton, Wagner, Waxman, former executives from MLB’s San Francisco Giants and the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, and former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg. Also among the club’s minority investors are Sandberg's husband and former NBA star Andre Iguodala.
There’s plenty of reason for optimism about immediate on-pitch success for Bay FC, as joining Oshoala in Northern California will be:
Four-time (once each with FC Kansas City and Western New York Flash; twice with North Carolina Courage) NWSL title-winning goalkeeper Katelyn Rowland
2021 NWSL Defender of the Year Caprice Dydasco
Former Florida State, Atlético de Madrid, and Manchester City forward Deyna Castellanos
The #2 and #8 overall picks in last month’s 2024 NWSL draft - respectively, North Carolina left-back Savannah King and Stanford midfielder Maya Doms
23-year-old Zambian star Racheal Kundananji, who scored 25 goals for Madrid CFF in 2022-23 - a mark bested in Liga F by only Levante’s Alba Redondo (27) - and just commanded a women's world record transfer fee.