It must be tough to break into a first team in a similar position to the best player in the world, you can have all the talent you’ll ever need and it’ll be tough when your compatriot has already made the club his own.
Lionel Messi broke through into the first team squad in 2004, aged 16 years old. Everyone knows the next bit, taking the mantle from Ronaldinho and ushering in spell of dominance to become the centre piece of certainly the best club side I’ve ever watched and in the conversation for best ever with Sacchi’s Milan and Michels’ Ajax.
La Masia has always been a conveyor belt to feed the first team but two of the most talented players, for various reasons, fell away.
Bojan Krkic is someone who I should find easy to right about being a Stoke fan, but I find him an absolute enigma and it’s hard to pin down what has actually gone wrong with him. From different bits I’ve read, he was actually valued better in the academy than Messi. Maybe it was timing as he’s a few years younger and could have been in Messi’s spot if he was a few years older than him. Certainly when they were younger, they were very similar players, small, beautifully gifted second strikers with great footballing brains, Messi has obviously gone on to play whatever roll you want him to further forward (Target Man is probably a bit of a stretch though).
From what I’ve seen first-hand, Bojan is definitely a confidence player and so he can suffer from indifferent spells. I genuinely think he still could have been a big six Premier League player, he certainly has the ability to, when you look at when he first broke through into the Barcelona first team, his record for someone so young was actually outstanding, and since then it hasn’t really panned out. I may be way off the mark and there might be something else, but throughout his time thereafter at Barcelona, the loan spells, his time at Roma and everything else, he’s never been given the role as the man so to speak, I genuinely think he needs an arm round him and to be told he is the best.
Just from his time at Stoke, he had maybe a three month spell where I feel he was one of the best players in the league, he could win games on his own for us and then we unnecessarily played him in the cup against Rochdale, he scored the winner and then had a really bad injury and hasn’t really been the same since. It does frustrate me though, the fans love him and every manager we have had recently starts him for one game every so often to appease them and then hauls him off for lack of impact after 60 minutes when its glaringly obvious to me that he needs a run of games without consequence to get his confidence back up. I guess that his career is winding down now that he’s moved to the MLS so it’ll be a career unfulfilled, a crying shame really.
The third player in the diminutive forward trilogy and one who had comfortably enough potential to threaten Messi at the time is Giovani Dos Santos, Football Manager shoved him on the game at 15 years old and gave him Freddy Adu levels of hype.
Barcelona, similarly to Messi at Newell’s, poached him at a young age (11 years old). It’s a similar pattern again, he broke into the first team at a really early age and looked like a potential world beater, easily the most ability laden player to come out of Mexico.
Again, it all went wrong quite quickly and oddly. Same pattern, different player. He had a decent first season, especially considering his age and his ability was apparent for everyone but he was shipped over to Tottenham a year later and that didn’t work out well either.
He’s become something of a journeyman since and hasn’t really settled properly anywhere he’s been barring a reasonable couple of years at Villarreal but even then he didn’t set the world alight. One of the reasons for this and something that Harry Redknapp has mentioned since is that his attitude wasn’t great and let’s face it, if someone isn’t fully committed then you can be pretty sure that’s the real reason why.
He has however, been brilliant at times for Mexico. Every time I’ve seen him play for them he has been outstanding anyway. He has for years, since the Blanco and Borgetti era, been the main man for them. You don’t reach over 100 caps under a stupid number of managers for no reason.
I just wrote this as food for thought really as something that popped into my head recently, but if Messi wasn’t there, would one of these two slotted in as the world class number 10 in that Barcelona team?
False 9 