Stoke forward Bojan Krkic has admitted that Lionel Messi comparisons stopped him fulfilling his potential.
The Spaniard made his first-team breakthrough in 2007 with Barcelona at 17-years-old, breaking Lionel Messi’s record as the club’s youngest player to feature in a La Liga match.
His impressive start to life at senior level, along with an incredible goalscoring record at youth level, meant that Bojan was inevitably compared to Messi – a comparison that the forward simply couldn’t shake off, piling the pressure on him at a young age.
“You need to control the things you can do,” Bojan told BBC Sport. “My first year I scored 10 goals in La Liga. Then people started saying ‘yeah, the new Messi’.
“You can do nothing about this. In the end, I know my qualities and I know I’m not Messi. I’m Bojan. If people say ‘this guy was not the new Messi’, yeah I was not the new Messi.”
Even after Bojan left Barcelona to join AS Roma in 2011, he still couldn’t rid himself of the “new Messi” tag, something that he has only recently learned to deal with.
“It’s not easy,” he continued. “Messi scores three goals every game. If you score one goal, you’re not Messi. When I went to Rome and Milan, you go there not as Bojan, you go as a new star, a new Messi.
“So if you go there and play good, it’s not enough. You need to be the best, you need to be the Messi. That’s the thing that didn’t help me.
“At the beginning, it’s difficult to understand but with experience, you know what you can do.”
Bojan happy in Stoke: “Here the people respect you more”
Despite playing for European giants such as Barcelona, Roma, AC Milan and Ajax, Bojan insists he feels more at home with Stoke City, who he joined in 2014, despite spending spells out on loan at Mainz and Alaves during that time.
“Here in England is the place I feel more respected outside the pitch,” he added. “I feel really proud of my career – more here in England than in Spain. There are different mentalities. Here the people respect you.
“I felt this is a nice place.
“I played in the semi-final of the Champions League, I played for big teams, and now I’m in the Championship. This emotionally is difficult but I’m enjoying it.
“In Spain and Italy, when you win you are the best and when you lose, you are very bad. In Italy, one game you win and score, you cannot go in the street because the people are so enthusiastic, and when you lose they go crazy. After the game, they wait for you.
(Photo by Marco Luzzani/Getty Images)
“When I was in Rome, we lost a game and the fans were waiting for us at the training ground. The next game was against Lazio, the game of the year. They said ‘today you can lose but the next game there is no excuse not to win’. But it wasn’t said that nicely.
“Many players don’t care about that pressure. There are players who are more sensitive. Here in England, you don’t feel this and can enjoy playing. It’s different to play here than those places.”
Stoke are currently 12th in the Championship table and face Ipswich Town at home on Saturday.
The post Stoke forward Bojan: Messi comparisons didn’t help my career appeared first on Squawka News.
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