Lahyane Wants Out

Nabil Lahyane wants to go home. There it is, plain, and I will not dress it up. The Dutchman has told his Barcelona team-mates that he wants a return to the Netherlands, and the word from the dressing-room is that the men around him understand it.

In my day a player kept that sort of thing behind his teeth until the summer, and the papers found out when the suitcase was packed. Not now. Lahyane, thirty-five, has been at Barcelona since the transfer from Chelsea in August 2055, and the numbers tell you what he has given them: 309 games and six goals in that shirt. Before that came Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea, RB Leipzig, Leeds United, Sheffield Wednesday, and at the very start AZ Alkmaar, where a young man from the Netherlands learned the trade. Eight clubs, 674 games, 11 goals, and 149 caps for his country with four goals. That is a career that has been everywhere, and a career can tire of everywhere.

This season the starts have thinned to one, with two more from the bench, under a manager, Nicholas Dimario, who arrived only on 4 June. A new man sorts out his own favourites, and a thirty-five-year-old with all those miles on him feels the cold of it. His mood around the place is put as fair, his happiness below happy, and the wish to go home dates from 25 October.

What I like about this is that nobody is briefing against anybody. He has told his team-mates, and the team-mates think he is being treated unfairly. In my day that was called loyalty, and it ran both ways. Barcelona, a regular name in the international game, will do what they do. But a man who has played his football in England, Germany, France and Spain for fourteen years is entitled to think of the flat fields of home. Watch this one.