Former Barcelona striker Bojan Krkic has revealed how he did his best to keep Girona’s Yan Couto away from Manchester City, giving him a warning that sadly came to pass.
Krkic has been speaking to Cadena SER about the full-back, who is currently starring at La Liga leaders Girona after arriving on loan from Manchester City in the summer.
The full-back has proven to be a key player for one of Europe’s surprise packages, putting in a series of impressive performances for Girona that’s earning him plenty of attention as a result.
The biggest question is where has this player been all this time, with clubs wondering how they managed to miss out on such a player.
That’s not the case for Barcelona, though, who had wanted him earlier in his career and did everything they could to ensure they won the race for his signature.
This is something the player himself has admitted to, revealing in an interview last week that it was only a phone call from Pep Guardiola that stopped him joining the Catalan giants and instead saw him move to Manchester City.
That switch very much hasn’t worked out so far, with him spending the last few years on various loan deals away from the Etihad, a scenario that Krkic warned him could happen.
“Yes, he could sign for Barça. The penultimate U-17 world championship was won by Yan Couto with Brazil,” he said.
“A Barça scout was there, and he said that we had to go for Couto, who was the future Dani Alves. He contacted him and they asked me to be with Yan.
“He came with his family and his agent to Barcelona to sit down and talk to us, assess the issue, see the facilities, hear the club’s intentions, but it was a stopover. That is, he was going to see Manchester City and to Bayern later.
“I was having lunch with him, and I told his agent. ‘I know you’re going to Manchester and Munich, but he thinks he’s a ‘Barça player’. I told him, ‘look at the young City players who have come up to the first team…’ At that time not one.
“’At Bayern it’s super difficult…’, I insisted. They told me that they valued him a lot… But they went to Manchester and signed.
“We were meeting at the Sports City talking about everything, about conditions, they liked everything, everything, everything… In fact the boy told me, ‘I want to play here’, but then what happened happened.”
