Kuwait's 'golden boy's' journey at Camp Nou

Barcelona"I remember when we were trying to get our driver's licenses. We drove around Portugal a bit during a preseason training camp. Maybe it wasn't legal the whole time, but it was a lot of fun," admits Viktor Claesson (Värnamo, Sweden, 1992), captain of Copenhagen, laughing as he prepares to take the reins. reunion with his compatriot Roony BardghjiA promising talent and a star for Denmark's top club for the past five seasons, he's the protagonist of an extraordinary story of precocity and love for Barça. This summer, the young winger realized his lifelong dream: to play for Barça.

Bardghji was born in 2005 to two Syrians who met in Aleppo and decided to emigrate to Kuwait in search of a better future. "It wasn't an easy life. In fact, it was a difficult life," explained his mother, Rola, in an interview. Every afternoon, his father, Samir, and son would go down to the front of their small apartment with several balls to "train." Roony was three, four, five years old. The outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011 cut off their path home. The family decided to emigrate to Sweden. First, his mother left with Roony and Rayan (2009), a winger for Danish club Nordsjaelland and also a youth international. "It was a very tough time," said his mother.

They ended up in Kallinge, a town of 5,000 inhabitants six hours from Stockholm. One day they went out for a walk, and Roony, always with a ball under his arm or at his feet, took off running when he saw the football pitch. "A friend of mine saw him and called me to ask if he could play with our team. He told me he had just seen Messi. I laughed, but when he came, I saw that yes, he had a lot of talent. He was different from the others," says Per Gardell, his coach at Kallinge SK since Bardghji arrived at the age of six. He was so good that he played with three teams: the one a year older, the regular one, the one two years older, and sometimes the one his own age.

Rola helped by selling snackssweets, hot dogs and coffees at the club bar. Later, Samir arrived. "They were on the pitch almost every day, doing extra training. They had a very tough training program. I remember always seeing them there, training, and asking, 'Who's that kid?' They spent hours and hours, and you could tell they had a long-term plan: they weren't just shooting at the goal, they were also dribbling between cones, working on their physical conditioning. They worked on their physical conditioning." The father dreamed of his sons becoming footballers and trained them with this goal in mind. Being a footballer has always been Bardghji's priority above all else.

"Roony Bardghji always dreamed of playing for Barça"

Gustav Gardell, son of the first coach and former teammate, now a first-team player, now an electrician, remembers that Bardghji wore a Barça shirt many, many days. "During training too. He always dreamed of playing for Barça." "You could see the curtains with the Barça crest in his room from the street," he says. Bardghji watched videos of Messi's goals and tricks over and over again, completely enamored with the Argentinian. The Bardghji and Gardell families watched the Champions League final together every year. "When Roony tore his ACL in Copenhagen [2024], I was scared, but he showed impressive mental strength. We did a good job here, and now it's Hansi Flick's turn," Per says, laughing.

He then signed for Rödeby and Malmö, and on November 15, 2020, his fifteenth birthday, he signed for Copenhagen as a "rising star" and "a unique player," according to the Danish club itself. He made his debut with the first team six days after turning 16, the minimum age to play in the Super League. He started in front of more than 25,000 people chanting his name. That day, they had to help him get to the locker room. It was the man of the match And he ended up signing autographs and explaining to the press how to pronounce Bardghji. He was sixteen years old and had played two games for the first team, but Copenhagen had already made a four-part documentary about his journey.

Claesson speaks of a "very good person" and a footballer with an absolutely exceptional left foot, very technical and "very disciplined": "He never took a day off." He spent all day on the pitch. At Parken Stadium, no one will ever forget Bardghji's goal in the 88th minute of the historic victory against Manchester United on November 8, 2023, when he was a week shy of his eighteenth birthday. He became the 22nd youngest goalscorer in Champions League history, a list led by Ansu Fati and Lamine Yamal. Some suggest he's named Roony after Wayne Rooney, because his father was a big fan of the team. red devils. In that match, Marcus Rashford, Bardghji's hotel roommate during his first days at Camp Nou, was sent off. Despite coming off a year sidelined with injury, Bardghji had many offers, but he chose Barça to fulfill his dream and because he didn't want to leave Copenhagen for free out of loyalty. The Catalan club was willing to pay a transfer fee of around €2.5 million. He already has two goals and four assists in 500 minutes. He wears the number 19, previously worn by Messi and Lamine Yamal.

Copenhagen admits they miss him and had hoped to keep him for another year or two, "but it was quite obvious to everyone that it couldn't be that way." Claesson, a Swedish international with 74 caps, is happy to see that Bardghji "is no longer just the golden boy", but also a reality of Barça and the national team. "Sometimes, if we played badly, he would say something like, 'Look at how Barça plays!'" Claesson says, laughing.