Marc Muniesa: Keep an Eye on this One

By: Isaiah | February 22nd, 2008

I know I’m usually pretty bad about exploring the youth ranks of the great and wonderful club that is FC Barcelona, but sometimes when a player makes a case for himself as the potential future of a club, you’ve got to sit up and take notice. Because our search feature doesn’t seem to work, I’m not sure if Marc Muniesa has been featured in the “A Name to Remember.” If he hasn’t been, he should be. Sport gave him a limited profile (Google translated here)today in what can only be categorized as a rallying cry before the kid turns 16, the age at which he can be offered a professional contract.

Muniesa is 15 and can play as either a center or left back with equal ease. And apparently it is ease because he’s moved up through the youth ranks with the same speed at which Bojan moved up. While it’s obviously too early to say whether he’ll make it at the top level (much less at Barcelona), especially since the kid is freakin’ 15 and should be figuring out what that lump in his pants is whenever Shakira comes on screen rather than thinking about professional athletic contracts, it’s really nice to see that the Barca youth system is once again producing defensive machines like Puyol rather than simply magnificent offensive gems. We’ve got several of those, some of whom I will go into detail about later as their status becomes more apparent (one kid that was profiled is twelve — for god’s sake the kid has probably not even started puberty and he’s already splashed on the front covers of newspapers like he’s the next next coming of Maradona, and he is Argentine, incidentally). So it’s nice to see that it’s kids like Marc Crosas and this Muniesa that are receiving the gold stars in practice, not just the goalscorers. The scouts know their business, as apparently Chelsea and several other teams have already considered approaches for Muniesa on his birthday (they can’t legally approach him before that, I guess).

So now it’s time to wait until March 27 before reading more into this. Yipee!