Breakthrough players – since I moved to Spain, this has definitely been one of my favourite topics. Usually it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, but this season it’s a little like having your nose pressed to the window of the sweetie shop. Oliver Torres will benefit from a year at Porto, especially if he gets regular high-level match experience – but he’s a gem of a footballer and it’s sad that what’s likely to be his breakthrough season comes in Portugal, not Spain.
Juan Bernat was an established talent, as was Alberto Moreno, but for each of the full-backs this would have been a year where they were expected to command, to lead the team, to embellish their game with assurance and authority – again, each of them will be doing so in a foreign league: Bundesliga and Premier.
Then there’s the immensely exciting Jesé. He broke through like a Tyson right hook in the first part of last season … but the impact was curtailed by his horrible ligament injury. As he’s not due to be back until the winter, and then will have to find both form and his place in the team, we won’t be getting the fun and the excitement of his breakthrough season as a consistent first-team starter across 10 months this time, either. Sad.
So there’s extra importance, to my mind anyway, on how a handful of players either emerge or pogress.
1 Aymeric Laporte (Athletic Bilbao)
Define breakthrough? He’s just turned 20 but he played 35 times for Athletic in the league last season. Fifty appearances over the last two seasons. There are elements here which remind me of Sergio Ramos at his best. Powerful, daring, full of competitive appetite – sometimes raw, but this is an exciting footballer. Tests? Coping with both domestic and UEFA football; breaking through into the plans of the France manager Didier Deschamps; helping Athletic reduce their goals against tally [38] in case scoring goals is harder to come by this season.
2 Munir (Barcelona)
Given the stench of board mediocrity, player and coach complacency and general decline, how FC Barcelona require evidence that it’s not all about the €180m spent on Neymar and Luis Suarez in the last 12 months. Munir is one hell of a talent. Audacious, blessed with both skill and creativity but the appearance of a guy who has that most precious of abilities – finding himself in the right place at the right time.
The new UEFA Youth Champions League helped his development greatly. Top scorer in a competition where Barcelona became inaugural champions, he not only hit the net home and away against a variety of different defensive styles, he scored the most daring long-distance lob in the final of that competition against Benfica. He’s been accelerated through three different Barcelona teams: Juvenil, Barça B and now the first XI in the space of a handful of months. Obviously, talking about breakthrough players can be risky. I saw Jean Dongou as possessing all the movement, pace, finishing power and eye for goal which should have, by now, made him a top-squad regular, instead of still trying to regain his prolific touch in the B team. That said, Munir looks not only to have won Luis Enrique’s trust, but in finishing pre-season top scorer he has impressed senior players, too. Here he comes, world.
3 Denis Suarez (Sevilla)
Without him once having been disrespectful about Manchester City, this is a kid who found that there were fewer benefits to living and developing in England than he believed there would be. His technique and his thrill at taking an opponent on marked him down as a very high-quality prospect at 17 [hence City’s interest in transplanting him from Celta to their youth system]. But he wasn’t physically ready for Anglo Saxon values in football and in the short time since he’s been back, he already looks much more comfortable. Full of ambition and, like a young Sergio Canales, full of the sheer joy of running at [and past] opponents from midfield positions, he can be uplifting to watch. He’s got a trick, he’ll give goal assists and the Sevilla crowd should quickly adopt him as a figure who is emblematic of their craving for show and style. Still under contract to Barcelona for another three years, he gives the impression of a guy in a hurry to make an impression. He’ll give value for a Sevilla season ticket.
4 Isaac Cuenca (Deportivo de La Coruña)
Nobody who knows me will be surprised by this one. His last couple of seasons have been horror stories. His age, 23, doesn’t really count against him, given that he’s lost two entire campaigns, and then some, to a brutal series of knee ligament problems. When he broke through he looked a guy who brought pause to the play. When everything else and everyone else was haring around at breakneck speed, Cuenca would seem to have more time, more balance, more vision than the rest. He’d not do the old chulo thing of slowing the game down by putting his foot on the ball – what he had was a vision of two or three plays ahead of where the ball and players all were before possession reached him.
Elegant, creative and with the threat of laying on oodles of goals for team-mates, it was fascinating watching his intelligence. In the moment he laid on a Champions League semi-final goal for Sergio Busquets against Chelsea, it looked as if Cuenca’s career was turbo-charged upwards. Not so. Chelsea knocked them out, Cuenca’s knee was ripped up over and again … and now his contract with Barcelona has been torn up by mutual agreement. Depo, his new club, will be fighting to stay away from relegation and there’s the nasty prospect that even if he’s blessed with basic fitness then it can be the elegant players who are discarded first. But coach Victor Fernandez has always understood man management, has always liked to give a premium to ability over height and power and is well placed to help Cuenca move on from his bitter last two years. More, Cuenca is likely to have another unfilfilled talent, Canella, behind him on the Depo touchline and they could form an intelligent and effective partnership. My fingers are crossed for this kid pretty much more firmly than anyone else in La Liga this season.