Regarding FC Barcelona’s match against Real Betis from Sunday, it’s really impressive how Koeman’s team played completely different matches in each half. You can see it on these offensive heatmaps, but let’s get a more specific look.

In the 1st half, FCB began 34% of its possessions in its own third, but only overcame pressure (got into the last 40% of field) in 12% of those. The comparison with the 2nd half is shocking: FCB overcame pressure in 63% of its possessions started in its own third.

Somehow, these numbers explain why the first half heatmap is so low compared to the second half. It took FC Barcelona a lot of effort to gain depth; in fact they nearly didn’t get any. There were very few options ahead of the ball and very little offensive movement.

Related to that, one of the main aspects Koeman’s team changed in the second half was the activity in the central attacking lane. In next maps we can take a look at the passing to that zone, coloured by verticality.

Looking at the 1st half map, there’s a huge concentration of passing on the right side, but most of them are supportive actions or balls coming from the right lane, executed with short horizontal passes. Mainly Busquets's and Pjanic’s actions.

Here we can see that in he 2nd half there was more variety of passes, more players involved and more active zones. With Messi as the main character, not only did activity increased. There were more line breaking passes, more actions inside opponent’s box, a bigger passing range…

Great offensive improvement in the 2nd half, mostly in build up, that lead FCB tripling its shots: 3 in the first half, 9 in the second half.

With Pedri and Messi, FCB got to play between the lines. Having Griezmann more fixed plus Trincao and Dembélé on the wings led to better offensive movement.