There is no better place to meet someone tied to FC Barcelona than the restaurant of the Hotel Sofia.
It is just 400 metres (a quarter of a mile) from their Camp Nou home. Former club president Sandro Rosell is sitting in the hotel lobby as we arrive. Inigo Martinez is also here, waiting for his signing from Athletic Bilbao to become official.
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It’s the right place to speak to someone so intrinsically tied to La Masia — Barcelona’s academy. A man so associated with the club that despite not playing for them since May 2011, Barcelona lent him an auditorium at their stadium a few months ago to announce his retirement aged just 32.
Retired players can sometimes no longer resemble their glory days — they can be a symbol of the passing of time.
This is not the case with Bojan Krkic.
Bojan walks in looking much like he did in his 2007-08 debut season.
He doesn’t have a wrinkle. He is in top physical shape. Despite the fact he is now into his fourth decade, he still has the spirit of a smiling child that once stole the hearts of the Camp Nou crowd, having made his first-team debut a few weeks after turning 17. So why has he chosen to retire so young?
“The beginning and the end of a stage is not a matter of age, it is a matter of experiences, of knowing how to choose,” he tells The Athletic. “Especially in the United States and Japan in the last three years, my experiences have been without a partner. Being alone.
“Loneliness has been there in all the experiences I have had. On a personal and professional level, I already felt fulfilled. I have achieved much more than I could have imagined when I started. It was a heartfelt decision.”
The longer he speaks, the easier it is to understand. Bojan defines himself as a sensitive person, and at one point his sensitivity led him to be one of the first elite footballers to confess he had suffered from anxiety. At that time, mental health was still a taboo subject generally — even more so in the world of football.
Now, from the distance of retirement, he explains the extent of it and the impact it had on his career.
It came on badly in the middle of that first season with Barcelona’s senior side.
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“All those emotions started to take over,” Bojan says. “I felt like I was no longer in control. My body reacted with dizziness. I had 24-hour dizziness that was accentuated depending on what was happening. When I was calmer, I had more constant dizziness. I had the sensation of not being in control of what I was experiencing.
“I was particularly affected by my new identity. I was Bojan, the public figure. That impacted me in my day-to-day life, in my intimacy and in myself. I am a person who likes physical, emotional and real contact. And I saw that all that was impacting me — 100 per cent.
“They were new experiences, and I probably didn’t want them. I wanted to play football, but I didn’t want fame. I have never liked excesses and that was an excess. This made my body understand that my life was going down a path I didn’t want. I just wanted to play football.”
That feeling grew until he had to make a drastic decision — to give up on going to Euro 2008 as a member of the Spain squad who went on to win that tournament.
In the February, there had been a prestige friendly against France in the Spanish city of Malaga. He was called up to the squad for the first time, but on the day of the match was unable to play. The statement given to the press was that he was suffering from gastroenteritis, but the truth was he’d had an anxiety attack. “I was at my limit,” he says now. The situation dragged on.
“I made a very human decision not to go to the European Championship and there was brutal media pressure. The press didn’t understand why a 17-year-old Catalan boy was saying no. And it had nothing to do with political issues (such as the campaign for Catalonia’s independence from Spain). I was a kid who needed space and time to understand what was going on. To say no was a decision that was nobody’s fault.
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“I felt I had to tell the truth. But the truth wasn’t told when I missed my debut with the national team. It was said that I had gastroenteritis. I didn’t say it, the Spanish FA said it. From the beginning, they didn’t tell the truth. A boy of 17 years does not have the strength or the voice to stand up and say it.”
He ended up winning just one senior cap — 25 minutes off the bench against Armenia the following season.
Bojan has been seeing psychologists since childhood. It clearly helped him choose when to retire, when he left Barcelona for England in 2014, and also to say no to the national team due to his mental health at a time when that was not yet in the public consciousness.
He adds: “My body and mind couldn’t cope any more. I needed a solution. On an emotional level, it was a very big burden.
“Many times, people don’t know how to say, ‘Enough’. They have too much ambition or too many demands. You have to understand your limitations and the tools you have at that moment to deal with the situation. At 17, I had little experience, but I had to make that decision. To continue growing and to continue living the dream of playing football, the price I had to pay was not to go to the European Championship.”
He decided not to tell anyone in the football world. Not Barca’s then-coach Frank Rijkaard or any team-mates.
“If you explain a muscle rupture to someone who has not suffered it, they are not going to understand the pain,” Bojan says. “No matter how much you explain anxiety, people don’t understand. It is difficult to empathise. Firstly, because I wasn’t externalising the situation. Also, I hadn’t missed any training, I was playing. How could that be?”.
It was a bump in the road. Bojan had arrived at Barcelona at the age of nine from Linyola, a small town 90 minutes’ drive west of the city, and burned his way through the academy. “I moved up the categories very quickly — I didn’t finish full seasons with the same team. (But) That didn’t guarantee me anything. All I knew was that things were going well.”
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Just after turning 16, he made his debut for Barcelona B and by the end of that 2006-07 season had played in the first team too, albeit in a friendly. He broke records as well. Bojan is still the top scorer in the history of the club’s youth ranks, with 423 official goals.
“I never had the goal of being a Barcelona first-team player,” he says. “I felt like a child when I played — I just wanted to have fun. I wanted to score goals, and I scored them.
“Barcelona B was more serious. There were players twice my age, but at no time did I feel like I had to do well to get into the first team. I felt like I had to do well because it was my responsibility and because I was having experiences that were helping me develop quickly at a very young age.”
Barcelona B play in Spain’s senior leagues, and despite the side being relegated in that 2006-07 season, he finished as their top scorer at the age of 16. That caused issues with his older team-mates.
“In a football dressing room, there is a lot of competition,” he says. “I was progressing a lot and very fast, and that logically provoked acts of jealousy. No matter how much I was promoted, I kept scoring goals in higher categories. The year of Barcelona B was a complicated year.
“I arrived with the season underway. The players were being criticised. Suddenly a young lad arrived and started to score. This didn’t make them happy, neither my team-mates nor my rivals. They saw that I had things that could give me a chance.”
Then came the call from Rijkaard. He wanted to try the kid out in training.
“That day, I was dying of thirst. I was sitting in the changing room before training and there were some bottles of water for the players but I was unable to get up to get one. I arrived an hour before training and I was sitting for the whole hour and I didn’t move. I got up for training, came back, took a shower and went home. I didn’t even go to the gym.
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“I was in my quiet place, just watching. It’s probably an exaggeration but it shows the respect you have to have when you take different steps. I felt I had to earn everything that came my way. Even a bottle of water.”
Then began what he calls “a constant dream”. The first team.
He started pre-season, then went to the Under-17 World Cup in South Korea, scoring five goals and receiving the award as the tournament’s third-best player as Spain finished as runners-up, losing the final to Nigeria on penalties. He returned and made his competitive Barca debut in a La Liga game against Osasuna on September 16. That was followed a few days later by a first Champions League appearance against Lyon at Camp Nou, coming on for Lionel Messi at age 17.
“I didn’t have time to take it in,” Bojan says. “I had opportunities and there were results. And it was constantly like that.
“Frank (Rijkaard) was so important. He was the person who gave me access to the professional world and the support a player needs to grow and have a career. The coach is so important — he is the one who gives you confidence, who gives you protection, who knows you and who can get the best out of you. He gave all that to a 17-year-old kid.
“Just with a hug, I could feel that he was protecting me, that he was there for me. Whatever the situation. Before a game, when he substituted me, or in a training session, if he saw a situation of conflict between veterans and youngsters, he would come up to me and say something. I’m a very emotional person, and so was Frank.”
Later, after Pep Guardiola succeeded the former Netherlands international in the summer of 2008, one of his biggest supporters would be Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Ironically, Guardiola would drop Ibrahimovic, who was then loaned to AC Milan, so Bojan could play.
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“(Zlatan) protected me from everything. He is one of the top players — but he has the biggest heart of anyone I have ever met,” Bojan says. “That year (the 2010-11 season) was complicated for him and he always showed great professionalism. He was an example for everyone. He’s an extraordinary person.”
Bojan soon saw that the competition to play for Barca had only just begun.
“I remember one day when I already knew that I would do the pre-season with the first team. I told my psychologist that I really wanted to take that step and leave behind all the jealousy and envy. She looked at me, smiled and didn’t say anything. It soon came to a head. The game became less and less of a game, the competition increased and the responsibility increased a lot.”
He had hardly digested what was happening to him but Barcelona fans were already pinning all their hopes on him. They called him the new Messi.
“I didn’t understand why they were giving me those labels,” Bojan says. “I didn’t want them either. I wanted to make my own way. I learned to separate other people’s goals from my own goals. It has happened, and it will always happen. We are always looking for the new Messi, the new Ronaldinho. But the same people who call you the ‘new Messi’ are the ones who call you a failure.
“I understand it is part of the game, but that conditioned me. They didn’t let me be myself. I am aware of the player I am, of what I have done and that makes me very proud.”
The pressure Bojan felt could be felt by others given the same labels as him.
“I was physically prepared to compete, and I proved it. But personally, I wasn’t. We are in a world in which society wants instant results — what is new is exciting… We forget that behind all this there is a person and that he is still very young.
“The stages of success are there to be run through, and although mine were very fleeting, I went through them all. What can’t happen are cases like Ansu Fati or Lamine Yamal, who have gone from the youth team to the first team (at Barcelona in recent years). They have skipped a fundamental stage of personal and professional growth. This is something that the clubs themselves must control and prevent from happening.
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“It is important, because at a formative level there is a growth. No matter how good a player you are, there is no guarantee that you will be able to play in the first division — (three years ago) Mallorca gave Luka Romero his debut at the age of 15 and he has not been seen since. Which makes me wonder why they do these things. Is it to get a medal as a club?
(After 14 Serie A appearances, just one of them a start, in two seasons with Lazio, the now 18-year-old Romero recently signed for Milan on a free transfer.)
“If you really want to bet on a 15- or 16-year-old at a professional level, something that makes no sense, it shouldn’t be to give him a chance. It’s because you can see the player has something that no other player in the rest of the world has at an older age. It’s not the same playing in a youth team with kids your age or a year older. Playing in a reserve team with players twice your age is, on a competitive level, on a dressing room level, semi-professional. It’s a fundamental step for personal and professional growth and because you have to prove at every step that you are ready.
“We are unfair to youngsters. Then we complain about their attitudes. It’s not their fault, it’s our fault. We are teaching them that playing in the first team is easy and that there is no value in being in a reserve or youth team. We are destroying the basics of development.”
If anyone knows the Barcelona academy, it’s Bojan. That’s why he has been rumoured to return in retirement to take over the management of the club’s youth football programme. He does not hide the fact that he would love to. He spent a year and a half training for a master’s degree in sports management at the Johan Cruyff Institute here in Barcelona and now wants to start a coaching course.
“If there’s one thing I have, it’s the knowledge of my experiences as a player. I have it because of the situations that I have experienced and experiences I can empathise with. It is something that would be very rewarding for me to do — to help a player get the best out of himself.”
We talked about his time after leaving Barcelona for Italy at age 20 in the summer of 2011. He has played in Serie A (Roma, and a loan to Milan), the Eredivisie (Ajax on loan), Premier League (Stoke City), Bundesliga (a loan to Mainz), La Liga (a second Barcelona spell and on loan at Alaves), MLS (Montreal Impact) and Japan’s J-League (Vissel Kobe). Out of all of them, leaving Barca aside, he says his favourite period was with Stoke, beginning in 2014.
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“The Premier League is the best league there is. It’s the league I’ve enjoyed the most. The Stoke fans are the ones I’ve empathised with the most and the ones I’ve loved the most. We had some fantastic years, but I also experienced the hard part of football. I suffered a cruciate ligament tear. But I recovered very well and very quickly. Those were fantastic years.
“The Premier League is different, in terms of organisation, history, respect from football fans and footballers. Also the media. The fan goes to watch football. For them, it’s a religion. They don’t care who you play against, they go to the pitch to cheer on their team. They enjoy it and what you perceive as a player is the pure essence of football.”
MLS surprised him after he swapped Stoke for Canada four years ago. “It’s a league that is constantly growing. It’s becoming more and more visible, new franchises are coming in every year and there are better stadiums. Soccer, as they call it, is a minority sport there, but it is attracting more and more people.”
Bojan confesses the time since retiring has been very retrospective for him and he is taking stock of his career. He says that when he said goodbye to Barcelona that second time nine years ago, he never thought about returning.
“Often we make the mistake of comparing, of asking ourselves if we could have done better, and we forget what we have done. If we focused on that, we would feel much more fulfilled. We would see that what we have done has a lot of value. That’s what I try to do.
“The four-year-old boy who was chasing a ball has been able to play for 16 years at a professional level. At no point have I ever stopped being a sensitive person, and it’s something that I’m proud I’ve maintained.”
