Why does no one care that Barcelona are the most dominant team in modern La Liga history?

Barcelona sealed their eighth La Liga title in 11 seasons, yet nobody seems to care about their dominance of Spain’s top flight over the last decade.

After scoring the lone goal in Barcelona’s 1-0 victory over Levante, Lionel Messi sealed the 10th La Liga title of his career, to go along with four Champions League victories and plenty of other smaller trophies. Messi has been at his finest as a 31-year-old veteran, pulling the strings for a Barcelona attack that includes just one other player with double-digit goals — ace striker Luis Suarez.

Barcelona’s latest La Liga triumph makes it eight championships in 11 years, and they have clearly set the benchmark in terms of dominance in the modern era. Only the Real Madrid teams of the 1960s, buoyed by larger-than-life legends Ferenc Puskas and Alfredo Di Stefano, needed fewer years to accrue as many championships.

But in many ways, it feels like Barcelona’s La Liga dominance isn’t as big of a deal as it should be. It hasn’t dominated the headlines, perhaps because the expectation is for Barcelona to be the top team in La Liga.

Although they sit nine points clear of second-place Atletico Madrid and are a whopping 18 points ahead of arch rivals Real Madrid, Barcelona face plenty of competition in a league where the likes of Sevilla and Valencia have also found success. The 2018-2019 campaign has been a weak year for the teams besides Barcelona, especially Real, but it’s not like Barca’s other seven titles victories in the last 11 years have come without contest from Spain’s other top clubs.

Of course, when it comes to Barcelona, winning La Liga is the standard. That’s understandable, given that Messi is the best player in the world, Suarez is probably the best striker in the world and Ousmane Dembele is a spell-binding 21-year-old who cost the team nearly 150 million Euros. And those are just the top three attackers.

As impressive as Messi’s 10th career league title is and as remarkable as Barcelona’s success, with a variety of managers, is, the fact of the matter is that the goal is a Treble. Therefore, the plaudits only truly come when Barcelona win the Champions League, in addition to winning La Liga. In the years when Barcelona won the title but Real Madrid prevailed in the Champions League, few celebrated the joys of dominating Real domestically.

This season, Barcelona are in the semifinals of the Champions League with a matchup against Liverpool, who certainly don’t take winning a league title for granted. If Messi, Europe’s leading scorer, can help lead Barcelona to his fifth Champions League trophy, then Barcelona’s stellar 2018-2019 campaign will be truly celebrated.

But if Barcelona falter against against Liverpool, Ajax or Tottenham and make it four straight years (gasp!) without a Champions League trophy, then their brilliance in La Liga will, once again, be reduced to a mere footnote. It is quite extraordinary how Barcelona have made excellence seem mundane, as only sheer perfection seems to turn heads when the Blaugrana are concerned.