Barcelona’s new chapter begins in familiar surroundings as life returns to Camp Nou

There was no sign of Laszlo Kubala or Johan Cruyff, their statues still safely packed in storage, and Lionel Messi had sneaked in alone under cover of darkness a fortnight before but FC Barcelona’s current players were finally back at the Camp Nou as 45,157 fans and a handful of men in high-vis jackets and hard hats watched them return home 909 days later. It was like old times. Athletic Club, ideal guests, had not won here in 30 matches and after two years away they didn’t win this time either, the last of four goals conceded soon followed by fireworks on an afternoon of reunion. “Montjuic was the beginning; the Camp Nou is where history will be written,” Lamine Yamal had posted during the week as Barcelona prepared to return after two years as temporary tenants at the Olympic stadium. Now here he was, beaming in the north-east corner, where one of the stands was full and the other empty and still incomplete, as Ferran Torres polished his boot. The 18-year-old called to mark a new era at this stadium had just produced a second extraordinary assist for Torres to score his second and Barcelona’s fourth, Robert Lewandowski and Fermin López getting the others. “It was a good day for us,” said Hansi Flick when it had ended, not so much because of how Barcelona played as because of what it all meant: a new era and an old one too, symbolised by that moment and many others. Lamine has played here before – once, for seven minutes, when he was 15 – but five of Barcelona’s starters had not. As for the coach, the first time he came, he had just been sacked by a third division team but had looked at the home bench and thought that one day he would sit there. Here, on the first day of the rest of their lives, he had. “Anything is possible,” he said. Related: European football: Olise inspires Bayern’s 6-2 comeback; Barça enjoy happy homecoming It had been “historic”, Flick said, which is how it was supposed to be. Ferran’s finish for the fourth goal had been virtually the last touch of Barcelona’s first match here since May 2023; the first had been reserved for Juan Canela Salamero and Jordi Penas i Iberri, the oldest club members able to attend. Wheeled to the touchline by Penas and Carles Naval, Barcelona’s delegate for 39 years, Canela took the honorary kick-off. He had with him the ticket from the inauguration of this arena on the festival of La Mercè in September 1957. No one had the ticket from the re-inauguration half a century later; access here was digital. On the morning of the return, around a thousand remained, priced between €199 and €588. By kick-off, which, like the return home, was late, they had all been sold. That day in 1957, 1,500 people performed a giant Sardana and 10,000 doves were released; this time, the first phase of the Camp Nou rebuild finally complete a year behind schedule, there was a DJ, and the city choir belting out the club’s anthem, a lot of tourists, and a four-nil win. Above all, for most there was a kind of comfort, familiarity, the sense that this could be both a way back to where they were and a new beginning. The Camp Nou rebuild is not done: only three sides of the lower two tiers are open, allowing for a maximum 45,401 of the 105,000 it will eventually hold, and at times, in truth, the day of fiesta was a little flat, quiet and underwhelming, but Flick said “it’s a really good feeling to be back here”, and back is the word. Barcelona had not been allowed to name this stadium after their founder, Joan Gamper, a foreigner and a protestant who had identified with the Catalan cause and whose 134th birthday it would have been today. And so it became known simply as the Camp Nou: the new ground. Here then, was the new new ground, which although it has Spotify for a surname still felt much like the old one. That will probably change when the third tiers are added and the roof is lifted on, but for now the stadium remains open and the architecture of the lower rings remain, like they were returning home rather than beginning again, a piece of their lives given back. Which came to define the day. The same bars, the same faces, the neighbourhood of Les Cortes full again. Between the maternity hospital and the cemetery, there was life again at the Camp Nou, so in they went. There is always something magical about that moment when you step out into the stands, seats surrounding you in many colours, green pitch glowing before you; here there was something familiar about it too, something they had missed, that wide bowl around the garden where Kubala, Cruyff and Messi once played and Lamine Yamal does now.