Thursday, October 31, 2024, 10:19
| Updated 5:20 p.m.
Marc Casadó is no longer an experiment with which to plug holes. The youth player, just 21 years old, closed a magnificent week against Bayern Munich and Real Madrid and showed that he has a place in the new Barcelona designed by Hansi Flick. His physical background, his ability to win disputes and the ease he has in handling the ball have convinced the German coach, who knows that he can fully trust him. Not even the return of footballers like Frenkie de Jong or Gavi seems to faze a player who has reached the elite to stay.
«It’s incredible. If you know where he comes from and you see him play now, how much he has improved… He is incredibly good in defense and also with the ball at his feet. “I’m very happy, everyone sees the quality of these players,” Flick said last week after the duel against Bayern when asked about Casadó. The German coach surrendered to the explosion of a player that very few counted on when the preseason began, but who has earned in his own right to be a fixture in the Barça eleven.
And the Catalan midfielder meets all the conditions that Flick wanted for his perfect reference midfielder. As he did with Joshua Kimmich at Bayern, the man from Heidelberg has molded an all-round player who is capable of being one of the pressure leaders in the opposing half, who knows how to retreat when that tactic does not work and who also has fluidity with ball. The Barça ’17’ has shown to have all these qualities and that has led him to be a regular in a double pivot that he has become the owner of alongside Pedri, who is much more liberated thanks to the physical background that his new companion is exhibiting.
Casadó’s importance in the new Barça is such that he has played in all the games between the League and the Champions League except for those his team played at the beginning of the season against Athletic and Rayo Vallecano, both before his teammate Marc Bernal broke down. the cruciate ligament of the left knee. Since that fateful day, Casadó has become great and has occupied a position that has always been key for the culés and that last year was a headache for Xavi Hernández. Frenkie de Jong, Andreas Christensen, Gündogan and Sergi Roberto passed through there, but none of them managed to bring together all the characteristics that Flick has seen in Sant Pere de Vilamajor.
Casadó’s explosion is a relief for Flick, who knows that he now has depth in the midfield that will allow him to face all competitions with confidence. At the Santiago Bernabéu Frenkie de Jong, Fermín López, Gavi and Dani Olmo had minutes, four players who have recently been hospitalized and who will now have to push to get into an eleven in which it is very expensive to play. One of those places in dispute is the one that Casadó occupies in the double pivot. The youth squad is now permanent and Flick, as he has already shown with Iñaki Peña, is not in favor of changing what is working. If he repeats that premise used in the goal, the recovered players will have to wait on the lookout for their opportunity.
Fermín, until 2029
The latest good Barça news in a truly fantastic week at Can Barça came yesterday with the renewal of Fermín López until 2029. The Andalusian midfielder, only 21 years old, extends the contractual relationship that united him with the Catalan entity until 2027 for two years more, with a substantial improvement in his salary and an increase in his termination clause to 500 million euros.
The player from El Campillo, in Huelva, thus reaches the conditions of a relevant footballer at Barça, just reward for a meteoric 2023-24 season. And after a loan to Linares, in the bronze category, he broke down the door of the Barça first team, with which he played 43 games and scored 11 goals. His emergence into the elite led him to be recruited by Luis de la Fuente for the senior team that won the European Championship in Germany. He later doubled his summer triumph with the Olympic gold achieved by Santi Denia’s under-23 team at the Paris Games, an unprecedented milestone since Barcelona 1992 in which he also played a starring role.
