Giovani dos Santos, a wasted talent – the Mexican was supposed to be a Barcelona star, but he didn’t fulfil his potential

Every season the football public is presented with a host of future football superstars, now young players whose potential reaches the highest levels. But few promising talents can live up to these expectations and climb to the very top of the world football hierarchy. There are many more who do not fulfil their talent and for various reasons their dream of football glory vanishes. One of the latter group is Mexican forward Giovani dos Santos.

The new hope of the Blaugranas

It’s been twenty years since the then thirteen-year-old Mexican boy with a knack for kicking the meruna moved from Mexico to Barcelona in Spain and started attending an academy near Camp Nou called La Masia. It was there that he was to learn football so that one day he could fight for a place in the first team of FC Barcelona. Dos Santos had the edge over his peers and across the age groups, virtually all coaches raved about him.

At 19, he made his debut for Barca, but had two huge setbacks in the Barca squad. It wasn’t that coach Frank Rijkaard didn’t trust him and didn’t want to give him opportunities to prove himself, but on the one hand, along with him, another promising talent Bojan Krkic was promoted to the A-team, and over time he looked much more consistent, and above all there was the second problem called Lionel Messi.

It was the diminutive Messi who, at that time, was already operating on the right side of the pitch and had a penchant for going for the ball in the middle of the pitch from where he did as he pleased. Typologically, the young Giovani wanted to be a very similar playmaker, and so it was very difficult for him, or his coach, to find a position where he could make a big impact and at the same time not get in the way of Messi on the pitch, to put it popularly.

Going to England

In sum, the Blaugranas directive indicated that there was no need to keep the Mexican starlet at the club and willingly sold him to Tottenham Hotspurs in 2008. How successful or not his engagement at White Hart Lane was is perhaps best evidenced by the number of minutes played in the Premier League in four years with the Roosters, which stopped at a staggering 367. The rest of his time was served on loan spells at Ipswich, Galatasaray and Racing Santander.

Rescue in Mallorca

He attempted to restart his career with a move to RCD Mallorca, where he found his feet and shone so brightly at the relegation-fighting club that after just one season he was scouted by a much more high-profile club, Villareal, who sent Mallorca €6 million for the undersized forward. After two years with the Yellow Submarine, where he was reunited with his younger brother Jonathan, he decided to answer the call from across the ocean and got shipped out to Los Angeles Galaxy.

Escape back home

In a considerably less demanding MLS, he was paying the price for being the team’s top scorer and the star of the entire league, but even across the ocean his rather fluctuating motivation was often evident. Even in the United States, he was one of those footballers who, if they don’t want to, they won’t try, and there’s nothing you can do about it as a coach or club owner. After three years in LA, he moved to his native Mexico, where he donned the jersey of Mexico’s most successful club, CF América. Even there, however, the Dos Santos football globetrotter didn’t last long and quit after two seasons with Las Águilas.

Since then, the thirty-three year old has been without a contract and it is hard to say whether any of the top league clubs, even in South America, will still be after him with his current reputation.

Giovani dos Santos was supposed to be a superstar, he was supposed to conquer the football world, but like many other South American playmakers he loved the nightlife and lacked the necessary motivation and diligence to translate his undeniable potential into stellar reality. And so the laughing chic did not go down in bold letters in football history, even though he was blessed with too much talent.

Sources: Transfermarkt, WhoScored, Goal