Still under the influence of Frenkie de Jong's great game, on Thursday against Villarreal, it is very legitimate to ask ourselves how it is that in the three seasons in which he has dressed as a Blaugrana we have never seen him play with this drive and leadership capacity. They say he hasn't played enough in what was his natural position, that he prefers to do it facing forward, driving the ball, rather than forward, with his back to the ball, outlining and carving up spaces in the area, from the square where Xavi he asks for his interiors to be placed. It may also be that, when he arrived, at 22 years of age, he entered for the first time in a team where he was no longer the best, where Messi was, where Busquets was, and adapting should not be easy. Or even that being under the orders of four different technicians (Valverde, Setién, Koeman and Xavi), he may only have added uncertainty and doubts to the enormous challenge of leading Barça's midfield. The point is that, after signing him, spectacular if we look at the suitors he had, we expected performance much sooner.
I don't know why no one remembers anymore, but Laudrup wasn't exactly the Laudrup we remember until after a couple of years. Not even Koeman. Let's not say Xavi, or Iniesta, who did not find their best game until after years of accumulating minutes in the first team. Surprisingly, we tend to overlook the time variable when we talk about talent.
For a report that I was commissioned many years ago in Barça magazine, I interviewed various promises from the lower categories who, in the end, had not managed to succeed with the first team. Some had not even gotten to play a single minute. But his old teammates, then already established figures in the first team, remembered them at thirteen, fifteen or sixteen years old, as the best of their batch or even as the best players they had ever seen. Can you imagine accessing your best version before your time, flourishing at thirteen, and deflating later, instead of reaching the peak of your performance, say, at seventeen, when the real possibilities of becoming professional come? Traditionally, one of the prides of Barcelona fans, one of their signs of identity, I would dare to say, has been knowing how to identify talent where other clubs, or other ways of understanding football, did not even pay attention. We would have to begin to assume that perhaps it is not enough to identify better than the rest where the talent is, but that it is also very important to have patience and create the necessary conditions for it to flourish. It's not just about knowing where the talent is, but how and when it can flourish.
