Tuesday, October 3. A slow Jules Koundé gets off the last one of the Barça bus upon the team's arrival at the concentration hotel in Porto, in the Boavista neighborhood. He gets out of the vehicle with a large leather bag from a luxury brand and with a bundle wrapped in a white cover. He takes it out and reveals a metal suitcase. Suddenly, he returns to the bus, which closes its doors. The security agent gets worried and asks the driver to open the door. Koundé does not get nervous. He folds the case, puts it in his bag and enters the hotel. With the same coolness, but at a much greater speed, the French central defender crowned his great game in Porto by returning to the race to prevent an almost expected goal from forward Pepe.
“I had no other choice. She went behind me, but I ran and made an inside touch that allowed me to take the ball from her. These actions are always satisfactory for a defender because they help to win,” said the Frenchman after the match. This is how Ter Stegen interpreted it, congratulating him with more euphoria than if he had scored a goal.
Expeditious, physical, confident and consolidated, Koundé (24 years old) is demonstrating at the beginning of the season all those virtues for which Barça signed him in the summer of 2022 from Sevilla. Of the ten games this season, he has started nine and only started from the bench in Mallorca. His only absence from the eleven coincided with the team's poor performance in defense.
Koundé, at a perfect age to grow bigger, has become Barcelona's most reliable centre-back in this stretch of the season. The most regular, without Araújo's physical problems, always more exuberant in his actions. In his second year on the team, the facts are proving him right. He knew that he would do better in the defensive axis than at right back, a position in which he became accustomed to playing last season as the team did not have a player with sufficient guarantees there. Of course, he always denied that he would ask to leave Barça if Xavi did not move him to the center of the defense. He called those statements directly a “joke.”
Not only did he not ask to leave, but his level of integration in the locker room and with the fans has multiplied. Upon Barça's arrival in Mallorca, he was the only player in the squad who stopped to sign autographs with the fans, with whom he also took photos. He was widely applauded. For a few weeks now it has also been common to see him writing words in Catalan on his social networks. “3 points”. “We continue.” “Thank you for your support.” These are some of his latest messages. Also on Instagram he could be seen recording a video walking through the mountain in which he stated “we can teach you something.”
Concerns and learnings that he also shows within the locker room, where he is considered a fairly reserved, introverted and shy person, although also a good person, very respectful and very interested in everything. Independent and very personal, the effort he is making to open up more is appreciated because this season he does not yet have a very close friend among his teammates. Last year he had a lot of life with Kessié and Dembélé, and the two have left this summer. He is also a good friend of the Madrid player Tchouaméni, with whom he shares a representative and with whom he has shared more than one vacation period.
Not so in Japan, where Koundé stayed for several days last June after Barcelona played a friendly in Kobe. The defender soaked up the mysticism of Japanese culture and in one of this season's matches he appeared wearing a Japanese national team shirt with the number 22.
Another of the curiosities that characterizes Koundé is its aesthetics, its desire to set style. He loves fashion reports, even being the protagonist of them, and he almost has to pay attention to how he will attend home games dressed. Baggy pants, shirts open at the chest, sunglasses, baseball caps...and suddenly, when you least expect it, a sober suit. A catwalk defender who is not letting even a forward pass.
