Anthony Gordon Named Best Player on the Pitch on Barcelona Debut After £70m Newcastle Exit

Anthony Gordon was lauded as the best player on the pitch on his first appearance for Barcelona, more than two months after completing a £70m transfer from Newcastle. The England winger finally got his chance to show what the fee was for in a pre-season friendly against Basel, and the response from inside the club suggests the wait was worth it.

Barcelona moved quickly to sign Gordon at the end of last season, with the surprise deal completed in the season’s final weeks, ahead of the World Cup. What followed was a long wait for supporters. England’s run to the World Cup semi-finals pushed Gordon’s post-tournament break back, which meant he started his Barcelona pre-season later than most of his new teammates.

An Instant Impression

Gordon did not take long to make his mark once he finally got on the pitch. In the opening minutes against Basel, he showed his pace by dribbling past his marker before firing in a dangerous low cross that neither Eric Garcia nor Raphinha could finish. Operating on the left of Barcelona’s attack, he kept making darting runs and looking to deliver crosses from the byline through the rest of his time on the pitch.

For a player who had barely trained with his new teammates, finding that kind of space inside the opening minutes of his first appearance was a notable start.

He nearly capped the display with a goal of his own. Picking the ball up midway through the Basel half, Gordon drove at the home defence, forced a slip from the covering full back, cut onto his right foot and fired narrowly over the bar. It summed up an afternoon in which he looked comfortable well before his body had caught up with the rest of the squad’s pre-season schedule. Gordon was withdrawn at half-time as he continues working his way back to full fitness, a sensible piece of load management for a player who had missed weeks of pre-season training that his new teammates had already banked.

What the Spanish Press Made of Him

The reviews from inside Catalonia were glowing. Barcelona-based newspaper Sport declared Gordon had been the club’s “best player in attack” after a “very, very active” appearance. Another journalist covering the match put it plainly: “Great minutes from Gordon in the friendly match between Barça and Basel. The Englishman is increasingly shaking off his marker and has delivered some fine crosses into the box.”

Spanish outlet AS went further, reporting that Gordon has already convinced head coach Hansi Flick to hand him a starting role this season, having trained with the squad for barely a week before the Basel game.

Fans Sense a Gap Finally Filled

Barcelona supporters were quick to react to the performance, and the reaction pointed to a specific hole in the squad that fans believe Gordon is built to fill. “Gordon is such a breath of fresh air. He looks so electric and who needed zero adaption. Looking forward to him,” one fan wrote. Another was even more direct: “Barcelona finally has a left winger that takes on defenders one on one Anthony Gordon. What a diamond.”

A third fan laid out the tactical logic behind the excitement: “Gordon will provide something that Barca has been lacking in recent seasons, a threat on the outside on the left. Also allows us to push the left sided midfielder higher and between the lines.”

That last point speaks to a structural issue Barcelona fans have been raising for longer than one transfer window. A left winger who can beat his man one-on-one and stretch the pitch gives the rest of the front line more room to operate centrally, rather than asking a midfielder to double up as auxiliary width. Whether Gordon can deliver that on a consistent basis across a full La Liga season is a different question to whether he can do it for 45 minutes in a pre-season friendly, but the early signs have given supporters reason to believe the profile fits.

That reasoning lines up with the decision Barcelona made in the market this summer. The club opted against making Marcus Rashford’s loan move permanent after his spell in Catalonia last season, choosing instead to move for Gordon at the start of the window. Rashford, another England international who spent time on the left of Barcelona’s attack, did not do enough in his loan spell to convince the club to keep him beyond it. Gordon arrives as his direct replacement in that role, with a full transfer fee attached rather than a loan arrangement.

From Everton Academy to a Newcastle Departure

Gordon’s route to Barcelona runs through Newcastle, and before that, Everton, the club he joined as a boy of 11. He left Everton for Newcastle in a £45m transfer completed in January 2023, a deal built on an initial £40m fee with a further £5m in potential add-ons, and one that came only after he had submitted a transfer request to force the move through. That deal made him Newcastle’s second-most expensive signing at the time, behind only the club-record fee paid for Alexander Isak the previous summer.

Gordon built his reputation at Newcastle as a direct, high-energy wide player, the kind of profile Barcelona’s supporters are now describing after watching him for less than 45 minutes. His £70m move to Catalonia this summer represented a significant increase on the fee Newcastle paid Everton two and a half years earlier, reflecting how far his stock had risen over his time on Tyneside.

A Confident Start Off the Pitch Too

Gordon had already won over sections of the Barcelona fanbase before he kicked a ball in pre-season. He impressed at his official unveiling by speaking fluent Spanish, and used the occasion to reveal that playing for the Catalan club had been a childhood dream. That kind of gesture tends to count for a fanbase that has watched plenty of high-profile arrivals struggle to settle in quickly, and it gave Gordon a head start with supporters before his delayed pre-season had even begun.

The gap between his unveiling and his first minutes on the pitch left plenty of time for that goodwill to build without anything on the field to test it. Basel gave Gordon his first opportunity to back up the impression he had already made off the pitch with something supporters could actually watch, and by the accounts of those inside the stadium, he did not waste it.

Adeyemi and Yamal Star as Barcelona Cruise

Barcelona won the friendly 5-2, with fellow new signing Karim Adeyemi opening the scoring in the first half. Hamza Abdelkarim and Lamine Yamal were also on the scoresheet, while Jesse Bisiwu added a second-half brace to complete the rout. Gordon’s half of football, sandwiched among a squad already several weeks into its pre-season programme, was enough on its own to set expectations for the rest of the build-up to the new campaign.

Adeyemi’s early opener was cancelled out by a Jean Doucoure strike that made it 1-1 at half-time, before Abdelkarim restored Barcelona’s lead shortly after the break. Yamal then converted from the penalty spot to make it 3-1, and Bisiwu scored twice in the space of two minutes to complete the scoring and seal the 5-2 win.

Gordon signed a five-year contract when he joined, tying him to Barcelona through 2031 and giving the club the long-term security it wanted for a fee of that size. The deal also included a reported €24m in agent fees on top of the transfer figure, taking Barcelona’s total outlay for the winger closer to €104m once every cost was accounted for.

Adeyemi’s goal stood out too, another new arrival finding an immediate rhythm in a squad still absorbing several fresh faces at once. A club the size of Barcelona rarely gives every signing the same amount of pre-season attention, and the scoreline against Basel offered an early sign that more than one new face is already contributing rather than just settling in on the sidelines.

With the delayed start now behind him, the next test for Gordon is stringing together a full pre-season workload before Barcelona’s La Liga title defence gets under way. On the evidence of 45 minutes against Basel, both the club’s coaching staff and its supporters appear to like what they have seen so far.

Newcastle, for their part, move on with a significant fee banked and a hole to fill on the left of their own attack. Gordon spent the last two and a half years turning himself from a promising Everton academy graduate into a player Barcelona were willing to pay £70m for, and the club he leaves behind will now be judged on how well they replace him. For Barcelona, the only question left after one half of pre-season football is how quickly a player who has barely trained with his new teammates can go from best player on the pitch in a friendly to a fixture in Flick’s starting eleven once matches start to count.