This article is part of Football FanCast’s Transfer Focus series, which provides opinion and analysis on recent transfer news…
Luis Suarez has been an excellent servant to the Blaugrana but with 32 years already on his back, Barcelona have to start thinking about his potential replacement. And AS claim they are keeping an eye on Lautaro Martinez for that very reason.
What’s the word, then?
It seems that the Catalan giants are finally thinking about bringing in a long-term replacement for their Uruguayan Pistolero.
Suarez has no doubt played a major role in Barcelona’s recent success and ever since he arrived from Liverpool, the now 32-year-old has been simply outstanding.
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In the 255 games he played for the Blaugrana so far, he managed to score an incredible 183 goals and also assist further 96 in the process.
By all standards, those figures are rather sublime.
But there comes a time in everyone’s career when their prime years pass them by. For Suarez, this might already be happening despite this year’s tally of four goals in six La Liga games.
For that reason, targeting Martinez is a smart move.
A worthy successor
Martinez is only 22 years of age and yet, he’s already evidently catching the eye of some of the biggest football teams in the world.
And looking strictly at his numbers so far, it doesn’t really come as a surprise.
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In the nine games he’s played for Inter Milan across all competitions so far this season, the young Argentine has already scored three goals and netted one assist as well. Not to mention that one of those goals was actually against Barcelona in the Champions League.
The Nerazzurri ended up losing that game but that was quite an introduction for the forward in front of what could be his own crowd in the not so distant future.
But the best thing about him is that he is quite consistent as well – in the 44 games for Inter Milan as a whole, he scored 12 goals and assisted three and before that, for Racing Club, he scored 26 in 58 games.
By all standards, not really a bad tally at all.
But he is quite young and his ceiling seems to be high.
Now all he needs might be a small push to get to the next level, and then, who knows – maybe Barcelona really do come knocking.
