Pedri will be Pedri, he will write his story, but every time I see the canary I shoot fifteen years ago. Not only when she dances on the lawn, but also when she appears at an event or faces the press conferences. Pedri has a lot in common with Andrés Iniesta. They are the most normal footballers in the privileged group of those who are not normal, of the chosen ones. As was the case with La Mancha, there are times in matches where time seems to stop for all players except for him.
Slender, light, it gravitates on its own axis to leave the opponent behind with a simple body movement. No need for speed or power: always well profiled, let the opponent attack and go out on the opposite side. Sometimes in football the key is to wait, to have enough patience to read the opponent’s movement, to let the world spin fast while a pause is applied. Few footballers in Europe now have as much mastery of the space-time relationship as Pedri. The canary will never be the fastest or the strongest, but it is the smartest. And he is 19 years old.
When Barça find Pedri between the lines, in the famous square in which they must receive the insides, attacking the backs of the rival midfielders, the canary has the pause and the necessary talent to break any defensive system. Give him some strikers who understand the game and attack the space to stretch the opposing defense – create the square – and Pedri will be kind of celebrating assists. Because as he plays and matures as a footballer, he will gain even more precision when it comes to running, and decision-making will be even better, and this he usually decides almost always well thanks to an innate quality and the basic work in Las Palmas.
At the age of 21, Iniesta was crowned as a reference footballer following an exhibition in Milan in the semifinals of the Champions League. Pedri has a long way to go to try to get closer to what Iniesta has meant to world football. La Mancha coincided with a unique generation and was surrounded by top players such as Busquets and Xavi. And he had Messi. Pedri will not have the Argentine, and this will mean that the collective milestones will probably never be able to get closer to what that team achieved, especially in the Guardiola era. But Pedri will have a series of squires – Gavi and Nico – that will allow you to think big. I never would have imagined that Barça might have a 2.0 version of the Xavi-Iniesta-Busquets triangle. Now, at least I didn’t go down without explaining myself first.
