‘Fat Tony is a Catalan’: Barcelona loves Gordon

Fran Santiago/Getty  Love at first sight: 

Gordon’s instant impact at Barcelona led to the creation 

by some fans of a popular flag in his honour (above).

After charming fans with his Spanish and selflesness, England winger feels like one of their own.

25 Oct 2026 - THE OBSERVER / Sport

By Rory Smith

A few hours before Barcelona’s game with Rayo Vallecano on the last day of August, Joan Solé hoisted a flag outside Casa Pin, a buzzy little bar around the corner from Camp Nou. He does this quite often: Solé is one of the driving forces behind Cultura de Grada, an attempt to promote the club’s fan traditions in the face of the game’s encroaching commercialism.

Recent designs have involved stylised images of everyone from Joan Gamper, the club’s founder, to Rosie the Riveter, the 1940s icon of America’s women shipworkers decked out in Barcelona’s colours, a senyera – the red-and-yellow flag of Catalonia – armband wrapped around her bicep.

Despite being based essentially on an England flag, his late-August attempt proved especially popular. It was, as he explained it on Instagram, a way of “paying homage” to the “union” between Barcelona and England, places that share a patron saint: what is known here as the cross of St George, after all, is seen there as the symbol of Sant Jordi.

That it resonated so much though was because it celebrated a rather more recent civic icon. In the middle of the flag, depicted in a vintage Barça shirt and sunglasses, clasping a Ballon d’Or, was Anthony Gordon. He was accompanied by the slogan “Antoni Gros és Català” – Fat Tony is Catalan.

Within a few days, Cultura de Grada had been flooded with requests to make smaller, personalised versions of the flag. As Solé said on his X account, the reaction to the image of “the future Ballon d’Or” was so “spectacular” that his group added it to their repertoire; anyone wanting their own Anthony Gordon flag could submit a request.

The frenzy is indicative of just how quickly Barcelona have fallen for the 25-year-old. This weekend, he may well be one of three England internationals on the pitch for the first Clásico of the season; having won all nine of their games in La Liga so far this season, Barcelona host a Real Madrid team that should feature Jude Bellingham and may include Trent Alexander-Arnold.

Both have been in Spain for substantially longer than Gordon; both arrived with much loftier reputations and with a good deal more fanfare. Bellingham, in particular, is beloved in Madrid, regarded as one of the club’s and the league’s brightest stars, but it is possible to make the case that Gordon, at this point, is more popular than either.

He had them, to an extent, at hola. He spoke in such fluent Spanish at his unveiling, after his £69 million move from Newcastle in the summer, that at one point it is possible to hear people in the audience volubly admiring his vocabulary and/or pronunciation.

But it was his debut, more than anything, which won over his new public. Gordon created one goal, scored by Raphinha, within two minutes of coming on as a substitute against Elche in Barcelona’s first game of the season; four minutes later, with his team now winning 3-0 and the game all but finished, he found himself clean through on goal.

Rather than shoot though, Gordon tapped the ball sideways for midfielder Fermín López, who duly rolled home. There have been times, not all that long ago, when such selflessness was not a common trait among Barcelona’s attacking players.

“Thank you, bro,” López wrote on Instagram after the game. La Vanguardia swooned at Gordon’s “magnificent minutes”, making a point that he was “very generous in making decisions”.

From that point on, the club – and the city – has been in love. Gordon and his partner Annie have reportedly bought a home in Barcelona; the joke goes that this makes them the only English people in Catalonia not staying in an Airbnb. Footage of them strolling along the city’s streets has been greeted as proof of their humility, their unassuming ordinariness. He has become a popular member of what even the club’s executives acknowledge can be a complicated, and often political, dressing room; this week, he and Karim Adeyemi were filmed doing an impression of Lamine Yamal, complete with lowslung shorts.

That Gordon’s pace, his industry, his intensity – the virtues with which he was always associated in England – have stood out on the pitch does not really qualify as a surprise; the rhythm of La Liga is, after all, far slower than that of the Premier League, where Gordon had spent all of his career (barring a brief loan spell at Preston North End in 2021).

Rodri, Barcelona’s other major summer signing from England, made the mistake of pointing that out: the Spain midfielder was forced to apologise earlier this season after being caught expressing his shock at how cautious and immobile his opponents were in a victory against a Valencia side that, like many of Barcelona’s opponents, made little or no attempt to press them. Sitting on the substitutes’ bench, Rodri accused them of being “lazy”; he sounded appalled by how passive Valencia had been. Gordon, to his credit, has been much more discreet.

Gordon’s head coach Hansi Flick has praised the winger’s “speed, his control. He helps us a lot with his dribbling, always being able to create chances.” “Such energy, such relentless effort,” as the commentator Fermín Suárez has put it. “He is completely complete and physically overwhelming.” Fat Tony, as the flag dubbed him, is an affectionate and slightly laboured pun: Gordon sounds like gordo, the Spanish word for fat, which is rendered as gros in Catalan. Nobody has any concerns about Gordon’s physical condition.

Far more gratifying to the man himself, though, will be the fact that those elements of his game that he has long felt have been underappreciated have been noticed, too. “Because I’m fast and because I press, that’s kind of the only thing people ever speak about,” he told Sky Sports this week. “But I’ve actually got a lot more to my game than those two things.”

Gerard López, the former Barcelona midfielder and now a television pundit, would agree. “His principle virtue is his intelligence,” he told The Observer. “He has the capacity to adapt very quickly; he is very quick in his head. He has pace, he can do one-on-ones, he can dribble, he scores goals and he gives assists. But he can also play in lots of different positions, which makes him ideal for this Barça, for the type of football they want to play.”

That, more than anything, explains why he has been embraced so quickly, so ardently by the club’s fans. Gordon may not be Barcelona’s biggest star; he may not be the club’s best player. But he feels like one of their own.