The arrival of Ilkay Gündogan is, given the club's circumstances, the best move that Barça could make on the market. And it is that, with the German, comes a piece of many virtues. The first thing to note is that he is a footballer who allows solving several important tactical issues. He is a manual midfielder (position 8) but he can also play as a pure midfielder (position 10). In fact it is the place where he has played all this year in Manchester City. And that, in a Barça key, allows De Jong to be reconverted to the pivot position without lowering the qualitative level of the interior with his presence.
It also gives the possibility of keeping Pedri in the upper part of the square (near the area) benefiting the team game. But it is also that he can fill in for any of the four midfielders because he has played in all positions at some point in his career. He is a player of proven quality at the highest level. He has been in the elite for more than 11 seasons, being a starter and an important player in all the teams he has been with (Borussia Dormund and City).
In fact, it has been capital in the fantastic season of Guardiola's team. Of the 4,590 possible minutes between Premier and Champions, he has played 3,356. That is, 73% of the minutes. One of his best virtues is his great reading to choose the moments to step on the area and resolve. He has ended up signing 11 goals and seven assists in the last season in what is a remarkable record for an attacking midfielder.
A record that is not exceptional because he has always had a lot of goals. In the 2020-2021 academic year he signed 16 goals between the Premier League and the Champions League and, in his career, he has accumulated no less than 60 goals in the leagues he has played. Another extra value of the German is that he dominates what Xavi wants: the positional game. He even comes from playing in the same system that Barça does: a 3-4-3 with an inside square.
And he knows not only the frame but also what this way of playing requires. He loses few balls but knows how to choose when he has to raise the risk. His passing reliability throughout his career has always been around 90%. In the last Champions League he signed 89.9% security combined with an average of 1.1 key passes per game. Without the ball, he does not lose interest in the game and has great intuition to know where the play will go ahead of time.
Two factors that make him a more than correct defensive value. Finally, highlight the intangibles that you will bring to the team: experience and leadership. The plus of already having 19 titles behind them (one Champions League and six national leagues between them). The main and almost only limitation of the current Gundogan is the unknown about how much he will have left on his maximum performance curve. There are few doubts that he has some section left at a very high level but only the passage of time will tell if it is two or four years. Be that as it may, Barça already has its problem solver.
