I was a Barcelona prospect and kept Kylian Mbappe quiet but I stopped trying after chat with manager

One minute you’re playing for Barcelona, the next you’re up against Rotherham – c’est la vie.

The ups and downs of football mean that one day you can be in the Champions League and the next in the Championship.

That’s the reality for some footballers – and the route back to the top is always still open.

Junior Firpo had to work to get his chance with Barca but when he made it – his impact was sensational.

In his second campaign with the club after joining from Real Betis, Firpo was thrown into the deep end against Paris Saint-Germain in 2021.

And we mean deep.

A Kylian Mbappe hat-trick and one from Moises Kean meant the French side took a 4-1 first leg lead into the second, which saw Barcelona then go 1-0 down.

Enter Firpo.

He told Relevo: “They put me on in the 30th minute and with almost no warm-up, we had to try to even the tie.

“In training they saw that I was very competitive one on one. And [manager Ronald Koeman] put the entire field against Mbappe. It went well, probably my best game, although they ended up eliminating us.”

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It was widely regarded as Firpo’s finest performance for the Blaugrana on the outside, too.

Still, it was not enough to salvage his Barcelona career and he joined Leeds United, then in the Premier League before relegation meant it was trips to Rotherham and Watford as opposed to the Parc des Princes or the Bernabeu.

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“The two seasons at Barcelona were very different. The first I was disappointed in myself. I really regret not having made better use of it. I didn’t take advantage of it well,” he added.

“[The second] I played very little. And yet at a much better level than in the first.

“I think Koeman didn’t know me very well: I was young, I had just come onto the scene, I had been in the elite for two and a half years.

“He was the first one to tell me to stay, but that didn’t turn into minutes later. I remember one time when Jordi Alba was injured and he put Dest at left back. The minutes he gave me were on the right… I had few of them.”

He added: “I looked for [explanations] at first but Koeman gave me an answer in which he was not being honest: he told me that I was contaminating the group… So I stopped trying.

“It’s very nice to belong to Barcelona for everything it gives you, but I wanted to play.”