⚽️ Despite the club’s financial issues, Barça Femení are back on track — for now
My Week in Sport(s) ⚽️ ⛳️ 🏏 🏈 🏉
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
Covered in this edition: ⚽️ Barça Femení, ⛳️ Nelly Korda, 🏏 Australia, 🏈 Travis Hunter and 🏉 Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu.
⚽️ Despite the club’s financial issues, Barça Femení are back on track — for now
Do I have too much faith in Spain’s top footballers? Just as Euro 2025 hasn’t convinced me that their national team was anything but the continent’s best, last season’s Champions League final didn’t drastically alter my opinion of Barça Femení.
I’ll admit that I wavered slightly over the summer, when the superclub’s financial constraints — and the knock-on effect on their world-leading women’s side — were widely reported in the football media. I needn’t have worried too much, though. Despite starting the Liga F season with only 17 registered players, head coach Pere Romeu — now in his second season in charge of the team — has Barcelona back on an impressive upward trajectory.
Shortly after I wrote about them back in February, Barça hit a relative low point by a metric called ‘adjusted goal differential’ — a blend of expected goals (with a 70% weighting) and actual goals (30%) often used by
of ESPN in his analysis given its relatively strong predictive power. At that point in time, they had an adjusted differential of +2.6 goals per game over their last 20 Liga F and UWCL fixtures. This was their worst rating by that metric since September 2023.
After this week’s big win over Bayern Munich in Europe, Barcelona have climbed to a mark of +3.4 adjusted goals per game across their last 20 — with almost all of their improvement coming in attack. (They have averaged 3.8 adjusted goals per game over this period, up from 3.1 as at the end of March.) Tuesday’s performance in particular — and their start to the season in general — certainly backed up their position as clear favourites to take home the Champions League trophy once again.
Beyond this year, though, their undisputed status as the best team in Europe is much more precarious. Six of their 11 most-used players in 2024-25 — including two-time Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putellas — are out of contract at the end of this season. If a considerable chunk of that playing talent gets redistributed across the continent’s other top clubs, there’s little chance that Barça will be as heavily favoured — or that my belief in their ability will be as strong — in 12 months’ time.
⛳️ American star Nelly Korda has regained her consistency — if not her winning habit — in 2025
Every golfer — amateur or professional — is on a never-ending quest for more consistent play. After an up-and-down season last year, Nelly Korda has certainly been steadier so far in 2025; she’s yet to be rewarded for that consistency, though.
In 2024, Korda won seven times in 17 LPGA Tour starts — but also missed the cut three times, as she struggled with her approach play over the second half of the season. In the same number of starts so far this year, she has made every cut. (If she can sustain this streak, it would be the first year of her pro career without a miss.) However, tournament victories have eluded her all season. Is this just a quirk — or is there an underlying pattern as Korda continues to come up short?
When she faded late at this year’s US Open, it was Korda’s putting that let her down. That hasn’t been a recurring feature of her close losses, though: according to the advanced data available at LPGA.com, she has gained strokes on the greens in four of her other five top-five tournament finishes. Quirk it is, then. And it’s a credit to Korda that she knows there’s nothing else for it but to keep chipping away. As she said last week after another fourth-place finish in Hawai’i: “I just love the grind.”
What else I learned last week
🏏 Australia run the other top teams in women’s cricket off their feet
Australia — despite a washout against Sri Lanka and a scare against Pakistan — are off to a solid start in this year’s ODI World Cup. For all the praise the team gets, their mastery of every aspect of run-scoring sometimes goes under-appreciated.
As well as being the format’s best boundary-hitters — in top-tier fixtures since mid 2017, their effective boundary rate is several points better than anyone else’s — they also score efficiently in singles, twos and threes. Over this period, their non-boundary strike rate is 48 runs per 100 balls; other top teams in aggregate score just 43. They don’t take undue risk while running between the wickets, though: the other seven teams at this World Cup lose batters to run-outs around twice as often as Australia do.
🏈 The Jaguars still aren’t sure how to deploy Travis Hunter on defence
Five games into his NFL career, two-way college star Travis Hunter has settled into one role for the Jacksonville Jaguars. Having played 59% of the team’s offensive snaps, he is clearly the team’s second-choice wide receiver behind Brian Thomas.
However, the team are still trying to work out how best to use him when they don’t have the ball. Overall, he has played 39% of the Jaguars’ defensive snaps so far this season — a figure which effectively makes him their third-choice cornerback. His deployment has varied drastically from game to game, though: he has featured on more than 60% of the team’s defensive plays twice in five games — and twice he has featured on fewer than 20% of them.
🏉 Passing is still a weak point in Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu’s game
Three players have started at fly-half for South Africa in their ‘Tier 1’ tests so far this year. 23-year-old Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu is the one who has grabbed the rugby world’s attention — and generated some hyperbolic headlines in the process.
Earlier this year, I explored how he was playing a different type of game to other players at his position; this unique style has also been evident in his test appearances in recent months. The Springboks’ other two 10s have completed 3.6 passes for every carry they’ve made; Sacha has completed just 0.7. He’s been less accurate with the ball, too: one in four of his passes this year has been tagged as a ‘Bad Pass’. Per Oval’s data, his peers have executed only one out of every 11 of their passes poorly.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Friday October 17th.
