ajnotkeith
Senior Member
It's fine if you dislike Romero. I was also never his biggest fan but think he has become more reliable lately. Calling him a racist without any evidence is wrong though. Unless you think he would intentionally report about Ilaix's wish to retun only to get more hateful comments towards Moriba again it's not his or other "racist Catalan media" fault that uneducated/uncultivated Barca "fans" on social media were going hard for Ilaix after his unpopular decision to leave. They were cleary way overboard with racist remarks but that's a responsibility of every single person sending him those shit messages/mails. We can't blame Catalan media for that.
I'm also sure Romero can handle "people giving him shit". It's part of his job, he knows not everyone will agree with him. That doesn't mean he was wrong about Ilaix wanting to come back or at least that he has some sources (that he trusts) telling him that.
Personally I was disappointed when Ilaix left because I believed he could become a very good player for the club while also thought it was the wrong move for him (and looks like it so far but he's still young and can turn things around).He was probably also ill-advised by his agents who were only looking for money. But in the end it's his career anyway and he can do whatever he wants. I still wish him the best like I do to every player leaving Barca (regardless of what I've thought about them before) unless they would sign for Madrid in future. That's the only sin I can't excuse. But if players believe the grass is greener on the other side then most of them will eventually be proven wrong.
For me every player that is unhappy at Barca should leave regardless of his name and status but I've never hold that against those players (mostly because we usually have exactly the opposite problem of players we want to offload not wanting to go). That's why I also wanted Messi to leave in 2020 when he clearly didn't want to stay.
After the game against Elche where Dembele played one of the best games I've seen in a while from him, many outlets and journalists wrote bad about him and said we shouldn't renew him and it just made me wonder... are we watching the same game? I thought he was phenomenal and could easily ended with 3 assists if we had a good striker.
I honestly believe a lot of that is driven by racism, because we both know if a Catalan player played that game nobody would stop talking about it. Instead when it's Dembele it's somehow a bad game. Louis Van Gaal said himself, when things go wrong here, they blame the foreigners. He has his own reasons to say that but it's something many people who have been at Barca have remarked on.
On Ilaix, these things can happen. He's only 18 and gone to a very competitive club in a new country, and as I wrote above the various Mingueza/Eric/Abde or whoever would probably suffer the same thing in a club like Leipzig where there's proper competition, not here where your replacement is Umtiti or Jutgla. He is naive for thinking the grass would be greener but I don't doubt it will make him a better player in the long run, having to fight for minutes and face competition. They changed their manager so he can probably get more in favour now.
