Sergi Samper

Agree. If the club think he needs another season in La Liga as a starter, I hope he joins either Eusebio's La Real if Illara leaves, or to whatever team Oscar Garcia joins if he does indeed move to La Liga next season. Both coaches would be great for him with regular playing time in the league.

Messi983 said:

Of course the question remains whether it would be better for him to stay at Barça and learn on trainings from Busquets and Iniesta while also playing a lot less than he does now. I think he should play every week at his age to develop so loan was a right decision. Of course he was meant to be playing for Paco Jemez whose football philosophy is similar to Barça and he'd likely play better overall under him but I think their current system is probably better for his defensive game improvement. As much as I like Paco Jemez he just doesn't care too much about defense so I doubt Samper would really learn much in that aspect of his game.

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I agree with most of what said,but I want also to say that I think that the club made the right decisions for his development.
Samper was between Barca B and 1st team in 1st half of 14/15 season due to his stellar debut season but as the season moved he struggled and regressed and was even benched for a month around April and looked part of Barca B problem rather than its savior.

Many though he should have been loaned or promoted but I think after bad and -more concerning- regression he needed such a step back where he plays in lower level but in a winning team where he is taking more responsibility as a player and as one of the leaders in the team and he actually rebounded well. May be he could have improved elsewhere but another bad season at that stage could have destroyed his career IMHO.
This year the team made many signings and many changes and it would have been difficult for him to be another player adjusting to the team,I think he could have struggled specially with so many players trying to fit in in our squad. Loaning him to play under Paco was no-brainer. while Paco being fired was unfortunate it is still very important learning experience

Samper is what?22? he still have his career ahead of him and playing it safe was worth it tbh,I think his time to come to play behind Busquets will come soon. May be after that we will see what we have in him in couple of years whether he is Busquets heir or back up. In both cases it will be worth waiting and not taking any risks

Messi983 said:

But [MENTION=16942]BBZ8800[/MENTION] said that Wenger was not even interested in Samper.

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I said that Samper went from a kid whom lots of big teams (Arsenal, for example) wanted to steal from us...
And he turned into a player (not a kid anymore), well, to say it politely: big teams aren't interested anymore in stealing him from us.

In this interview, he talks about Arsene's interest/love towards Barca from the past, when he was growing up.
That's how I see this article...

If you get my point.

It was in relation to:
Situation 1: a player is praised by Barca's forum, and current coaches adore him plus other big teams want to buy him.
Situation 2: a player is praised by Barca's forum, BUT either current coaches are meh about him (Bartra's case) or other big teams aren't interested in him anymore (Samper).

A lack of interest by player's coaches (Bartra, Halilovic), or a lack of interest from big teams is IMO a strong red light indicator about a player.
Regardless of what Barca forum think about a player.

Coaches can be wrong and there will always be 1 out of 10 or 1 out of 20 case where a coaches didn't rate a player, but later he suddenly turned into an awesome player, far from Barca (and people will point fingers on that case for the next 10 years in every future's case).
But in other 9 out 10 or 19 out of 20 cases, a lack of interest by our coaches or by other big teams usually says a lot about a player's development/ceiling/mental strength etc.

BBZ8800 said:

In this interview, he talks about Arsene's interest/love towards Barca from the past, when he was growing up.
That's how I see this article...

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I read it as he rejected Arsenal in the summer (there were rumors), to stay at Barça and join Granada on loan.

navidjaan said:

[youtube]qbqUgojeoYw[/youtube]

Nice performance from Samper, who lifted himself and his team in the 2nd half, despite being a man down.

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Good performance, keep it up!

navidjaan said:

I read it as he rejected Arsenal in the summer (there were rumors), to stay at Barça and join Granada on loan.

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Same here. I don't know why he'd say now that he rejected Arsenal 3 or 5 years ago. Everyone already knows that.

Arsenal wanted Samper for awhile now.

He tried to sign him along with Toral and Bellerin but Samper turned Wengers offer down to stay here while Bellerin and Toral went to Arsenal.

Recall him immediately.

Why?

xXKonan said:

Arsenal wanted Samper for awhile now.

He tried to sign him along with Toral and Bellerin but Samper turned Wengers offer down to stay here while Bellerin and Toral went to Arsenal.

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Arsenal love La Masia. When they got Cesc - they was trying to get Pique and Messi too.

God Serena said:

Recall him immediately.

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Busi out max a month, some even say two weeks.

Can we even bring him back in January? I didn't read anywhere if we included that clause to bring him back and he's become a very important player for Granada so it's better for him to stay there until summer and get as much La Liga experience he can.

I think even if Busi would be out for longer time it wouldn't make sense to bring Samper back because he'd probably be only Lucho's 4th DM option after Rakitić, Gomes, Masche and possibly even Roberto now that Lucho seems to trust Vidal more and he could play some games as RB.

Messi983 said:

Can we even bring him back in January? I didn't read anywhere if we included that clause to bring him back and he's become a very important player for Granada so it's better for him to stay there until summer and get as much La Liga experience he can.

I think even if Busi would be out for longer time it wouldn't make sense to bring Samper back because he'd probably be only Lucho's 4th DM option after Rakitić, Gomes, Masche and possibly even Roberto now that Lucho seems to trust Vidal more and he could play some games as RB.

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You can always terminate a loan, as far as I'm aware. No clause needed. Masche is already proven to be a no-go in our midfield and Rakitic is best used in the RCM position, there's no way Gomes would be able to mentally or physically handle the pressure of being our main man in midfield every single game the way Busi is and if he's anywhere near good enough to even fill that role is questionable, and if you think Vidal getting charity and trash minutes qualifies as "trust" you're going to be in for as rude an awakening as everyone else who expects Vidal to start after every solid performance only for him to be left at home or in the stands, so I wouldn't count on Roberto as DM, either. A long term injury to Busi would mean we don't have a single CDM and that'd be a terrible spot to be in. Samper's development be damned, the team comes first, and if we need a DM who knows our system while Busquets is out injured, we have one. This is unless you think our season is fucked anyways because Lucho is inept at this point, and would rather let Samper develop well for a new manager to come in and hopefully have the improved canterano to work with.

Although, Busi's injury isn't quite so severe, so I don't think calling the kid back is something we need to do.

God Serena said:

You can always terminate a loan, as far as I'm aware. No clause needed.

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Don't really know about that. I've read that RM included an option to recall Diego Llorente (Malaga) and Marcos Llorente (Alaves) from their loans in January if they needed one of them. Of course they have a transfer ban in January so that would be their only option if one of their CBs or DMs would get a longterm injury. I've never read anything about us including those clauses with our loanees but that doesn't mean we didn't include them. Of course we recently mostly loaned players we didn't count on so that clause wouldn't make much sense with players like Song or Vermaelen but Samper's case is different.

We could terminate a loan if Granada would agree with that. In that case they alone would probably ask us to terminate a loan like they did with Toral because they didn't count on him and they needed first team spots for other signings in winter transfer window. But now that Samper is one of their most important players they clearly wouldn't want to let him go, especially not a week before the end of transfer window because they wouldn't have much time to find Samper's replacement.

So if there is no clause included in his contract I don't think we can just unilaterally breach his loan contract with Granada and bring him back. We'd have to reach an agreement with Granada (probably paying them a small fee or maybe loan them another B team player they'd like) or we would risk longterm relationship with them. Yeah, it's "just" Granada but I think Barça wants to have good relationships with other La Liga clubs. And if we'd done that to Granada other clubs would also be aware of our actions the next time we'd want to loan our players to them.

Of course all of that is not important now that Busquets injury is not as serious as first feared so we won't even think about bringing Samper back.

I'm pretty sure since there's no clause, both clubs should accept the termination of the loan. Jon Toral didn't play much at Granada, so Arsenal recalled him. Pretty ure both parties wanted that to happen.