Quique Setien, the manager of Barcelona football club, said he has achieved his dream of coaching Lionel Messi at Barca and he is already looking forward to coaching Paris Saint Germain forward Neymar.
Neymar has always been touted as the next big thing in football after Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. But the continuous dominance of Ronaldo and Messi, even in their 30s, has continued to limit his reckoning.
Since he left Barcelona for PSG in 2017 for a world-record transfer fee of €222 million, the prominence of the Brazilian talisman in world football has dropped judging by the recent football awards where he was not anywhere near the top 5.
Even in PSG where he now plies his trade, his impact is not being felt as much as that of French youngster Kylian Mbappe who he has been partnering within PSG attack for almost three years now. For instance, this season alone, Mbappe scored 30 goals in all competitions for PSG while Neymar scored only 19 goals in all competitions this season.
Besides his controversial personality in and outside the football arena, Neymar is known to be very prone to injuries. He has always been criticised by some PSG fans even fans of the Brazilian national team for this. Though he does not have direct or indirect control over how and when he gets injured, some people believe that his lifestyle contributes to the frequency of going down with injuries.
These antecedents are not problems to Quique Setien who has described the 28-year-old Brazilian as a top-classed player. “I’d love to be able to coach him someday as he is a top-class player. To be honest, I’ve fulfilled a dream in coaching (Lionel) Messi, but I’d be absolutely delighted if Neymar joined us,” Setien told beIN SPORTS.
Neymar almost returned to Barcelona during the January transfer window but unfortunately for the player who has never hidden his desire to reunite with the Spanish La Liga giants, the deal didn’t see the light of the day.
The same trend has started already as speculations linking him with a move back to Barca are getting louder by the day. The likelihood of that happening this summer is relatively low due to the negative impact the coronavirus pandemic has on the revenue of Barcelona.
