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Pedro trades the comforts of home at Barca for the circus of Chelsea

By on August 21, 2015

Pedro was never going to burst onto the scene, having come through Barca’s famed academy, La Masia, alongside a famed generation including Lionel Messi, Cesc Fabregas, Gerard Pique and Sergio Busquets. Yet despite his obvious talent, since day one Pedro has often found himself upstaged by these peers.

There are a number of reasons that Pedro failed to maintain his grip on a starting position among such a talented group. Pedro’s attacking prowess is less overwhelming than Messi’s and Neymar’s, with less obvious flare and striking ability, he lacks perhaps the vision and grit of Fabregas or Iniesta, as well as the physiques of Pique and Busquets. Yet Pedro excels in many complementary ways with pace, skill, and a knack for scoring important goals. His ability to read the game, adhere to Barca’s possession-based philosophy and pop up in good attacking situations goes far underrated, with his winning goal in Barca’s recent UEFA Super Cup victor over Sevilla being just one case in point. For a winger, he also loses the ball at an astonishingly low rate.

The Spaniard steadily progressed through Barca’s reserve teams and made his first team debut at the age of twenty-one in early 2008. In a Barcelona team sweeping Europe, this was no small feat. But Messi had beaten Pedro by a good four years and was already Barca’s star, with a Champions League title and over a hundred appearances under his belt (2006/2007 being his first season as a regular starter).
Pedro, for the entirety of his career, has played in the shadow of Lionel Messi. It could either be the best job or the worst job in football, depending on your character. Many players aren’t satisfied with simply being another member of the squad, even if it is the best one in the world (think Ibrahimovic, as a famous Barca example). Instead, these players often prefer to be the marquee star at clubs just a small notch lower (e.g., Serie A’s biggest clubs, Atletico Madrid, or Paris Saint-Germain). While Eden Hazard, Angel di Maria, or Sergio Aguero, for example, could fit nicely into Barca’s starting eleven they chose instead to star for Chelsea, Manchester United and now PSG, and Manchester City, respectively.
Others go the other way. Arturo Vidal put in show-stopping performances for Juventus and Mario Gotze was Borussia Dortmund’s poster boy but both have moved to Bayern Munich and slot into Pep Guardiola’s squad and target a Champions League trophy this season.

Bar Bayern and their unusual philosophy for a top-level team, Karim Benzema stands out as a genuinely gifted player who has been courted by the likes of Arsenal for many summers, but chooses instead to remain at Real Madrid, apparently comfortable with Cristiano Ronaldo receiving most of the limelight. 

Pedro was Barcelona’s example of a consummate squad professional. Season after season his role shifted but remained important. He’s never spent a season with his starting position rid of any doubt, yet consistently earned around twenty-five league starts and eight or nine appearances as a substitute for the past several years. Never the start of the team, he contributed to Barcelona winning five La Liga titles, three Champions League trophies while never making headlines for the ego troubles that afflicted the likes of Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Samuel Eto’o.

Then, when Luis Suarez joined Neymar and Messi to form the club’s dominant attacking trident last season, Pedro’s role diminished. While Karim Benzema stuck around at Madrid through the tenures of Kaka, Di Maria, and Mesut Ozil to name a few, for Pedro, the lack of playing time became untenable. ”I don’t want to leave Barcelona but it is a complicated situation. It is not a money question, but a continuity question,” the winger said a few weeks back. “I want to play. Luis Enrique preferred other players and I have been waiting a lot of time.”

So now Pedro’s off to Chelsea, trading the comfort of his career home at the top team in club football to play for an old enemy Jose Mourinho. The Blues list of star signings has a speckled history — think Andre Shevchenko and Fernando Torres — and only time will tell if Pedro can stick and play a more important role than he did for Barca. Perhaps in the grand scheme of Chelsea’s future, the move is far less of a risk for the club than it is for Pedro.

Photo credit: Clement Bucco-Lechat, via Wikipedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.