Ilkay Gündogan will be a Barça player next season, in what is the best move that the Barça club could make this summer taking into account the entity's difficult financial circumstances. And it is that, with the German, a footballer of many virtues arrives:
The first thing that must be highlighted about the new Barca player is that he is a footballer who can "solve" several important 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 at 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 allows Pedri to be kept in the upper part of the square and close to the area, benefiting team play. But it is also that he can replace any of the four midfielders at any time because he has played in all positions at some point in his career. A global solver.
We are facing a player of proven quality and demonstrated at the highest level. He has been in the elite for more than 11 seasons, starting and important in all the teams he has been with (Borussia Dortmund and City) and has been the capital in the fantastic season of Guardiola's team. Of the 4,590 possible minutes between Premier and Champions, he has played 3,356. In other words, 73% of the quality minutes of the current European champion. This is his positional map (@sofascore) of the last edition of the Champions League:
Another extra value of the German is that he dominates what Xavi wants: the positional game. He even comes from playing in exactly the same system that Barça does: a 3-4-3 with an inside square. And he not only knows the frame but also what this way of playing requires. He loses few balls but he also knows how to choose when he has to raise the risk. His pass reliability throughout his career has always been around 90% accuracy. In the last Champions League he signed an 89.9% security combined with an average of 1.1 key passes per game (data @whoscored).
One of its best virtues is its great reading to choose the moments to step on the area and solve. He has ended up signing 11 goals and seven assists this last season, which is a remarkable record for an attacking midfielder. Numbers that, however, are not exceptional because he has always been a midfielder with 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 domestic leagues that he has played. He is a good free kick shooter too. An aspect that current Barça lacks.
Without the ball, he does not ignore the game. And that is something to highlight in a player of his football background, his age and his position. He does not get off the hook and more than meets the pressure tasks assigned to him. Having a remarkably powerful lower body helps make his snap jumps efficient. That, added to his great intuition to know where the play will go ahead of time, make him a more than correct defensive value.
Finally, we must highlight the intangibles that Gündogan will bring to the team and that have at least the same importance as football ones. A footballer who arrives with a total of 19 titles, with one Champions League and six Leagues behind him (five Premiers and one Bundesliga), arrives loaded with experience and a winning gene that will surely be beneficial in dealing with high-tension situations competitive. In addition, his reunion with Lewandowski (they met at Borussia Dortmund) will make the complicity between the two produce productive things.
It is a controlled risk but, obviously, the main limitation of the current Gündogan is the age at which he arrives (32 years). There are few doubts that he has some time left at a very high level but only the passage of time will tell if it is two or four years. The fact that he has signed for two years plus one and that, today's football, prolongs sports careers more and more, means that Barça can also have a certain calm in this.
To put some other limiting aspect we could talk about dribbling. Because Gundogan is not a good dribbler. He only registered 0.5 successful dribbles in the last edition of the Premier League. But he is a point of relative importance because, by the way he plays, he doesn't need it excessively either. Sometimes he would go well with a little more individual overflow inside but he has learned to live without that virtue and throw a lot of walls, short associations or outside shots.
