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Pedri has been the great star of the 2020/21 LaLiga Santander season, and the teenager, who turned 18 on November 25, has been one of the best news for the Barcelona fans.
He arrived from Las Palmas in the summer, but his signing had been agreed a year before.
The transfer was completed in just three weeks, thanks in large part to Toni Otero. He had previously worked at the La Masia academy in Barcelona and was then technical secretary of Las Palmas.
It was in 2018/19 when Pedri arrived in Las Palmas from Juventud Laguna, initially to play in his youth team Juvenil C.
He was close to signing for Real Madrid, but that never came to fruition and he went to work wearing the famous Canary Islands yellow jersey, promoted to Juvenil B that same season and finished in the Juvenil first team in no time.
At the club, they quickly realized that Pedri was special and went to work to renew his contract.
On July 2, 2019, Las Palmas president Miguel Ángel Ramírez ordered academy director Tonono y Otero to begin negotiating with the player’s agents, with preseason work with the first team as a feature of the new agreement. MARCA reported this four days later and Pedri learned the details of the negotiation by reading this newspaper.
On July 21, the head of the Barcelona academy, José Mari Bakero, heard from Otero, as Barcelona had been interested in the player for some time and had sent scouts to see Pedri during the preseason in Marbella .
Six days later, at the time of the 2019 European Under-19 Championship final, the first conversation took place between the player’s agents and Barcelona.
Bakero and Ramon Planes spoke about the player and Planes then went to see him in person, a friendly Las Palmas against Real Betis on August 7 at the Estadio Benito Villamarín. The teenager played 63 minutes and Planes wrote a very positive report about him.
The signing materialized then in the space of three weeks. It happened so quickly because Las Palmas needed to sell for liquidity reasons and Barcelona wanted to close the deal before other European clubs became competitors.
Miguel Ángel Ramírez and Patricio Vinayo on the Las Palmas side and Oscar Grau on the Barcelona side closed the deal before the end of that summer transfer market.
The plan was for Pedri to stay and play for the Las Palmas first team for a year, which he did before moving to the Camp Nou in the summer of 2020 and drawing the attention of everyone involved in Spanish football.
Source: m.allfootballapp.com
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