Sergi Roberto was born in Reus (Tarragona). He started his football steps at the youngest UE Santes Creus. At the age of 10, he joined the MIC Tournament and was selected as the best player in his group. He will soon attract the attention of the Nàstic technicians and will join the discipline of the Tarragona club as a child. But what is less known is that Real Madrid tempted him when he was just 14 years old.
Nàstic de Tarragona had at that time a partnership contract with Real Madrid. That contract allows the white club to have priority options over any player from the Tarragona club.
The signing of Jose Sicart As Technical Director of Nàstic (the person who will make the promotion of the club to the First Division) he will bring important changes to the sporting organization of the Tarragona club. The new DT questioned the collaboration agreement with Real Madrid and encouraged its president to break it. The argument is that Nàstic cannot condition the future of the most promising young players because some have offers and prefer to join clubs like Barça, Espanyol or even, due to geographical proximity, Valencia. That they linked the Nàstic youth academy to Real Madrid is not, for Sicart, a label that the most powerful club in Tarragona should carry.
The deal broke down and thanks to it, Nàstic secured the transfer of the blaugrana David García and Dani Tortolero, players who were key in lifting the people from Tarragona to the highest category of Spanish football.
Manuel Romero, scouting for Real Madrid in Catalonia, which has already broken the agreement and is behind those responsible for Nàstic, obtained from Xavi Tortosa (one of the grassroots football coordinators) who reported about his most promising young people. Tortosa will be gone shortly.
Without the knowledge of Nàstic’s DT, a meeting was organized in Madrid with the families of three promising sons to try to persuade them: Jorge Granados, a winger who was outstanding at the time, and Sergi Roberto himself.
Barça’s current midfielder He was very close to Real Madrid at that time. Sicart then met with three families at the club to find out in detail the status of their talks with Real Madrid and advised against Sergi Roberto’s family leaving for Madrid. Sergi’s family circumstances at the time were not a good time to distance him 600 kilometers from his closest circle. His introverted personality and his good academic performance in his school are other arguments that the Technical Director of Nàstic put on the table to avoid his white adventure.
Alerted to what was happening, those responsible for Barça grassroots football got together and traveled to Tarragona on several occasions to follow the young footballers of the Nàstic children’s team, and even recorded some games to watch them when detailed.
Nàstic gave Barça the opportunity for three young footballers to travel to Barcelona to carry out a series of training sessions there and thus be observed more closely by the technicians of La Masía. And after the trials, Albert Benaiges, azulgrana’s grassroots football coordinator at the time, informed Sicart of Barça’s desire to stay in Sergi Roberto and with pomegranate (who a few months later would lend to Cornellà).
Sergi Roberto signed for Barcelona and was thus able to combine his training with continuing to live at home. The Barça club paid for a taxi to pick him up and bring him back to his home along with some players from the area such as Marc Bartra and Oriol Romeu. Therefore, he was able to continue living at home during difficult times for his family and was able to continue studying that year at the same school. If all went well, they agreed that next year he would join La Masia, just like before.
Source: La Verdad
I am Shawn Partain, a journalist and content creator working for the Today Times Live. I specialize in sports journalism, writing articles that cover major sporting events and news stories. With a passion for storytelling and an eye for detail, I strive to be accurate and insightful in my work.
