He never hid it. In the summer of 2017, Barça turned his head. And it took him a little while to turn the page. Guest of Generation After This Thursday on RMC, Maxime Lopez agreed to speak frankly about the period when he was approached by the Barcelona management.
At 19, in the wake of his first season at OM, his name found itself on the front page of the main Catalan sports dailies, which had echoed the contacts between the young midfielder’s agent and the Blaugrana giant. But the discussions ultimately did not go any further and Lopez had decided to stay in Marseille.
“It’s a fact. I was young, I was 18, I was coming out of my first season as a professional. When you’re young, when you get to play in Marseille, your training club, and it goes well too, you don’t realize it. When you play in Marseille, you also have more visibility, you’re more exposed. It’s true that after my first great season, we had these contacts,” he recalled on RMC.
“It was a disservice to me”
“In the end, it worked against me because I had six complicated months where I played in the Europa League but very little in the championship. (…) I am also a die-hard Barça fan, especially Messi. To think that at any moment I was going to be in the same dressing room as Messi… It was also the time when Ousmane (Dembélé) had just signed for Barça. The sporting director had spoken to him about me because we knew each other a little. I said to myself: ‘If I am good all season…’ But that’s when you think like that you are completely wrong,” he confided.
Today at Paris FC, a Ligue 2 club he has just joined after four years in Italy, the former Marseille player does not want to harbor any regrets about that time. “I don’t want to blame others,” he assured. “It was between me and my agent. I think that in training I did a little less. The fact of having had a full season and hearing these things, maybe I was more relaxed. But if you’re not at full speed all the time, you get eaten up…”
- RMC Sport
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