‘It’s a blessing’… Spain coach responds to questions about Barcelona star’s excessive playing time | OneFootball

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The luxury that FC Barcelona continues to enjoy even today is one that revolves around having a plethora of talented youngsters. While the club’s financial situation continues to be bothersome, they have some respite elsewhere. Without these Barcelona youngsters, perhaps the club would have lost all semblance of relevancy by now.

However, that also means that with this great privilege comes a great responsibility for the club and others to take care of these young talents. Pedri has already been a case where extreme levels of negligence was shown in terms of his playing time and it led to the Spanish midfielder becoming quite injury-prone.

Now, instead of learning from that unwanted experience, the pressure and demands from 17-year-old Lamine Yamal are proving to be no less. The young Barcelona winger, irrespective of his generational talents, continues to be a player who is constantly being asked to feature for his club and country.

While at Barcelona he remains as a core member of the team for the entirety of the season and his appearances in official games make sense, the way that he continues to be used by Spain coach Luis de la Fuente is simply careless. Even in the last game against Serbia recently, the youngster was the only forward who played the entire game.

However, now that people have started asking questions about these methods and these queries have been raised in front of the Spanish National team coach regarding Lamine Yamal’s playing time, his response was one that instead looked to compliment the player and suggest stubbornness, as highlighted by Barça Times:

“It’s a blessing that they have a player of that level and that he plays so many games, being so young, with the national team.”

Ultimately, it is currently unsure how most people will react to this statement but it implies that he has no intentions of toning down how much he relies on the Barcelona youngster. He has already gotten Gavi injured previously by playing him in an inconsequential game and there is a great risk of that process being repeated with young Yamal.

That is simply a risk that Barcelona cannot afford to take and one that the Spanish coach must be made aware of. Many see Lamine Yamal as the future of the Catalan club, and for good reason. However, that is why it becomes even more important to safeguard and protect the youngster at all costs.