Marcos Alonso has lived Barcelona closely at home during his childhood thanks to his father, a former Barça player in the 1980s. Despite this, the current left back of the Catalan team was trained in the Real Madrid youth academy and even He made his first team debut in the 2009-10 season. A step through the white entity that did not change the culé feeling of him.
"It has been a complicated childhood in terms of the issue of following my father and being part of a team, but in my house we have always been from Barça and in the end it was the team that my father belonged to. And I am very happy to be here in the team of his life and hopefully it will be mine for a few years too", explains the 31-year-old defender in an interview for Mundo Deportivo.
His father, Marcos Alonso senior, played for Barça between 1982 and 1987, but the defender's football lineage goes back many years. His grandfather, Marcos Alonso Imaz, won five European Cups with Real Madrid, while one of his great-grandfathers, Luis Zabala, also played for several First Division teams, including Barça.
"The most special memory was the first time I came to Barça. It was in a classic. I was lucky to go down to the locker room afterwards when the players were gone. It was Iniesta's first year if I'm not mistaken", he reveals about his past culé, as well as remembering his father's famous winning goal against Real Madrid in the 1983 Cup final and Bernd Schuster's subsequent 'butifarras': "When I was younger, when you could watch videotapes, we had his games at home and from time to time we put them on".
"After doing the tests a bit reluctantly, they called me to go. My parents laughed. In the end it was the best thing to develop me. I spent many years there, I grew as a footballer and a person and I can't say otherwise," he recalls in another interview in Sport about his arrival in the lower categories of Real Madrid.
Later, he packed his bags to play for Bolton, Sunderland, Fiorentina and finally Chelsea, where he was for six seasons, between 2016 and 2022, until this past summer he dressed as a Barça player: "At any time in my career I would have chosen by Barça. Now even more, after so many years away, returning to LaLiga was one of my priorities".
At the Camp Nou he has direct competition from the young Alejandro Balde and a veteran like Jordi Alba, one of the players who "helped him the most in the early days". "The atmosphere in the locker room is very good," concludes an Alonso with a contract until June that he hopes to renew.
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