Why Mauro Icardi left Barcelona for Italy

Inter Milan star Mauro Icardi signed with Barcelona’s youth ranks in 2008, however, despite his undeniable quality, the Rosario-born striker failed to follow his countryman Lionel Messi’s footsteps and become a star at Barcelona. Icardi’s former team-mates Ivan Balliu and Oriol Romeu, and journalist Jaume Marcet recount the striker's time at the famous Masia academy. “There are not many generations from La Masia that have been so united over time. We spent a lot of weeks together in Ibiza,” Ivan Balliu, currently turning out in Metz's backline in Ligue 2, tells Goal. Icardi had joined a team that was more like a family. “The competition was healthy,” Balliu says. “In grassroots football, they always give you opportunities and we tried to take advantage of them when they arrived.” Icardi, though, faced more obstacles than most. Firstly, as Oriol Romeu, a fellow Barca graduate now at Southampton, recalls, the Argentine was quite a reserved character and didn't integrate well. “He was always covered by his family,” the midfielder says. “He only had a small connection with us.” “We've met a few times since then,” Romeu adds, “And we always talk about Barcelona.” Proof that the striker was steeped in the values of La Masia, even if his situation was more complicated than the rest. “He didn't have the same multi-faceted profile like most of the other strikers that we had in La Masia, but he knew how to hold the ball and he was a great goalscorer,” says Balliu. “How well he played in terms of his direct game was a given, and he could fight well with central defenders.” These characteristics, however, “were not exactly what was required of a front man in order to fit the [Barca] model.” Journalist Jaume Marcet points out that Icardi “was of the penalty-box striker archetype, an excellent goalscorer with a great air game, very different from the others at that time. “He wasn't a player who participated in the build-up; he used to be isolated and disconnected." Marcet adds, though, that "he is one of the best players I've seen in the formative football of Barcelona.” According to Marcet, the coaches at La Masia asked their forwards to “drop off down the middle to receive the ball, offer more things than mere shots on goal”. Icardi suffered as a consequence. “Maybe he wasn't prepared to take on these tasks because he had different characteristics,” Marcet says. Source- Goal.com

Mauro Icardi sends transfer message to Chelsea