Barcelona Champions League Squad Surprises: Abdelkarim and Bisiu Promoted
Barcelona have locked in their 25-man squad for the Champions League league phase, and the list carries a couple of quiet but telling surprises.
Abdelkarim and Bisiu step up
All 25 names are players with first-team contracts, as required by UEFA, yet two of them are still living between worlds. Egyptian defender Hamza Abdelkarim and Belgian youngster Jesse Bisiu, both usually seen as reserve-team players, have been promoted onto List A for Europe.
Their shirt numbers won’t change. Abdelkarim keeps 29 and Bisiu stays with 27, just as in La Liga. On the domestic front, they are officially registered with the reserves. In the Champions League, they now count as full first-teamers.
That shift is not just a cosmetic move. UEFA’s rules for List B — the one reserved for club-trained youngsters — shut the door on both of them. To qualify, a player must have spent two consecutive years in the club’s academy, or three consecutive seasons at the club with at most a one-year loan to another side within the same federation. Abdelkarim and Bisiu do not fit those criteria, so Barcelona had only one option: elevate them to List A.
Bardghji blow
One name is missing, and it stings. Roony Bardghji has been left out entirely after suffering a serious knee injury that will sideline the Swedish forward for the whole season.
His absence underlines how quickly things can turn. Bardghji already found minutes hard to come by last year, squeezed by the meteoric rise of Lamine Yamal in his preferred position. Now injury has removed him from the European picture altogether, just when he needed a platform to relaunch his trajectory.
Fariñas in a different lane
While Abdelkarim and Bisiu jump up a tier on paper, Brian Fariñas takes a different route into the competition.
The midfielder appears on List B, the academy list that clubs can adjust up to 24 hours before each match. He will wear number 28 in the Champions League, even though he runs out with number 4 for the first team in La Liga.
It is a quirk of the regulations: Fariñas meets the homegrown requirements to stay on the youth list, so Barcelona can preserve flexibility on List A while still having him available in Europe. On one squad sheet he is a fully fledged first-teamer. On another, he is still filed under “academy”.
For a club that leans so heavily on its production line, those fine-print distinctions matter. And for Abdelkarim, Bisiu and Fariñas, they could shape how quickly the Champions League stops being a distant anthem and becomes their stage.
