It’s a tasty Barça locker room anecdote, dating back to the Samuel Eto’o era. At the Catalan club between 2004 and 2009, the former Cameroonian striker recounted, in an episode of The Bridge on Youtube, the time when the locker room executives “scrapped” the Ferrari 360 Modena of a young player, guilty according to them of a lack of humility.
“It was also an opportunity for the kid”
In a conversation with Aurélien Tchouaméni, Samuel Eto’o spoke about the differences in mentality between his time and the current one. “It was different (…) When I take the example of the kid who comes with his Ferrari 360 Modena and we wreck his car, with 20km on the clock… We had a different mentality,” said the current president of the Cameroon Football Federation.
“You’re Ronaldinho, you’re Eto’o. Today, it’s something else. The guy is 19, he’s playing his second game and he shows up to training with a Ferrari,” Samuel Eto’o continued. “But it was also an opportunity for the kid. When you arrive at a club like Barcelona or Inter Milan, there’s a hierarchy. You can’t arrive and talk to Zanetti as if you were talking to your friend. All the youngsters who arrive, they have to know ‘I’m going to go up slowly’.”
Samuel Eto’o did not want to give the identity of this young player but cited Lionel Messi as an example, he who knew him at his beginnings at Barcelona. “Leo Messi, the best player in the world for us, he was always a guy…”, making a gesture with his hands as if to say that the Argentinian posed no problem. “He arrived at a club where it was a family and there were elders. We moved up the ranks. So when the guy arrives and he has his Ferrari, we tell him ‘Welcome, but you’re not leaving with your car.’ We ruined it.”
- RMC Sport
