I have consistently said that despite everything Yamal is achieving, Flick is still not using him to his fullest potential. Yamal tends to struggle in big games because it is easy for opponents to crowd him out or match him for pace on the wings. Yamal is not a pacy winger, and he never will be. You need pace to consistently get behind the best left backs in the game, and that is simply not Yamal’s biggest strength. What Yamal has is creativity, imagination, and the ability to do things that very few players can do. A player like him should be given the freedom to move around the pitch, exploit spaces, and constantly make life difficult for the opposition. He shouldn’t be restricted to the wing, where opponents can easily double up on him and limit his influence on the game. I don’t understand why Flick hasn’t made this a consistent feature of Yamal’s game. One of Yamal’s best performances came against Bayern, and that was exactly what he did. He moved around, found spaces, and made himself difficult to mark. Yet, since then, we have continued to see him remain on the wing in big games, making it easier for opponents to neutralize him. This has to stop. The solution isn’t necessarily to move Yamal centrally. The solution is to give him a free role that allows him to roam around the pitch and influence the game from different positions, just like Messi used to do. Barcelona need to stop thinking of Yamal as just a right winger and start building a system that gets the best out of his qualities. We also need to return to a 4-3-3, with a proper midfield three and Yamal given the freedom to roam. We have a generational talent in our hands, and it makes no sense to keep restricting him to the wing when we have already seen how dangerous he can be when given more freedom. The whole point of having a player like Yamal is to give him the freedom to create and dictate games, not make him predictable by keeping him in one position.