Yamal scores twice as Barcelona survive a Levante fightback to win 4-2

Barcelona's perfect start to the season kept going, though not without a scare. Xavi Espart and Lamine Yamal had them 2-0 up before the half-hour, Yamal added a penalty early in the second half to make it 3-0, and it looked routine — until Levante scored twice in the closing ten minutes to drag themselves back into it. Karim Adeyemi's goal in stoppage time settled things, and Barcelona left the Ciutat de València with a 4-2 win and a fifth straight victory to open the league campaign.

Espart, the 19-year-old given the left-back shirt in place of João Cancelo, opened the scoring in the fifth minute — his first senior goal for the club. Yamal doubled the lead on 19 minutes, running a counter-attack himself before finishing. Levante had barely had a foothold in the game before Barcelona were two goals and in cruise control.

Yamal's penalty puts it out of sight — until Levante rally

Yamal converted a penalty three minutes into the second half to make it 3-0, and with Barcelona seemingly coasting there was little to suggest a contest was still on. Levante had other ideas. Iván Romero pounced on a loose pass to pull one back in the 79th minute, and nine minutes later Roger Brugué scored a follow-up after his first effort was saved, to make it 3-2 and give Levante's home crowd something to believe in deep into the second half. Barcelona settled the nerves in the third minute of stoppage time, Karim Adeyemi beating two defenders and finishing low past Mathew Ryan to make the final score 4-2.

Goal timeline

Line-ups

Hansi Flick made three changes to the side that had beaten Valencia the previous round: Eric García returned from suspension at centre-back, Gerard Martín came in alongside him in place of Andreas Christensen, and Espart replaced Cancelo at left-back. Barcelona lined up Joan García; Eric García, Pau Cubarsí, Gerard Martín, Espart; Fermín López, Rodri, Pedri; Lamine Yamal, Raphinha, Anthony Gordon. Levante set up in a 4-3-3 with Ryan in goal, Toljan, Mandi, De la Fuente and Sánchez across the back, Requena, Sotelo and Olasagasti in midfield, and Víctor García, Ratkov and Brugué up front.

A perfect start extends to five

This is Barcelona's fifth win in five league matches this season. The run so far has been one-sided in the extreme — a 5-0 win away at Elche, a 2-0 home win over Athletic Club, a 5-2 win over Rayo Vallecano, and a 5-0 thrashing of Valencia the previous round, on top of a 5-1 Champions League win over Feyenoord in midweek. Levante's second-half response, however brief, was the first time all season an opponent had scored more than a single goal against Flick's side in the league, and it is worth noting for what it says about this Barcelona side too: even a brace from Lamine Yamal, still only 19, was not enough on its own to avoid needing a stoppage-time goal to close it out.

Where it leaves the table

Barcelona went into the round top of LaLiga on 12 points from four wins out of four. A fifth straight victory takes them to 15 points from five matches — the maximum available — while their closest challengers both dropped points or fell behind on the same weekend: Alavés, second on 10 points, lost to Racing Santander, and Real Madrid, who beat Rayo Vallecano to reach 12, remain three points back. Levante had come into the round 10th on 5 points from a win, two draws and a defeat. The loss keeps them on 5, in the bottom half of the table, though the fight they showed in the final ten minutes — two goals in nine minutes against the league's best defence so far — is the kind of response a newly promoted side can build on.