İlkay Gündogan is now safely back at Manchester City after a season at Barcelona which taught him how good he had it before he decided to leave Pep Guardiola’s side.
Luckily for the midfielder, the manager was ready to welcome him back with open arms, and an agreement was quickly reached to allow him to leave Barcelona as a free agent.
Since then, predictably, there’s been some chatter in the media around the Blaugrana about it being a good move for the team, but not everyone is having that.
Joan Canete Bayle, a journalist with Catalan newspaper Sport, has spoken out against the difference between ‘propaganda and reality’ at the club.
It’s explained that in a Barca dressing room packed with players who are either young, inexperienced or nowhere near as good as they or their agents believe, Gündogan was able to show off his ‘track record and extreme competitiveness’.
His demands for the highest of standards ‘angered some of his teammates’, but Joan Canete Bayle insists he was ‘pound for pound, perhaps the best player in the squad, certainly one of the best’.
It’s therefore seen as a disappointment that he’s returned to Manchester City for free.
The journalist then points out that rather than doubting the off-pitch management at Barcelona, ‘insinuations’ are published which question Gündogan and ‘difficulty in running backwards, his supposed lack of willingness to accept the bench, his bad relationship with Hansi Flick, his age and his salary’.
This is dismissed as the product of a ‘mud machine’.
Barcelona president Joan Laporte isn’t mentioned personally, but it seems clear he and his blind-faith supporters are the target, with Joan Canete Bayle cuttingly rounding things up with the following.
