“Kubo wanted to be the best in the world when he was 10 years old”

The arrival of Take Kubo Real is causing a sensational impact both in Gipuzkoa and in Japan, even though he hasn’t scored a goal yet. He has five seasons ahead of him to get fed up with doing it and he will try it from today against ‘Gladbach’ in his debut as a realist. Also his arrival in Barcelona 11 years ago, when he was only 10, was a ‘boom’.

His first coach at Barça was Alex Gomeznicknamed Loina by his colleagues for his affinity with the Real. “The boy came to train with us and after the first training we already told the coordinator, Albert Puig, that you had to sign him, ”he says in MD. Kubo was 10 years old and the team was junior.

He stayed with his brother Eiji and his mother

After a week at La Masía, the report was favourable. The problem is that Barça did not sign such young footballers at the time, so they suggested that he return to Japan, where they would monitor him for the purpose of hiring him when he came of age. But both the player, still a child, and his family refused. They convinced Barça and stayed Takehis brother Eiji, who later signed for Madrid when the realist did three years ago, and his mother. The aita was the only one who returned to Japan.

“What surprised me the most Take It’s that he had a Japanese mentality, very strict, but soccer-wise he was Latino, passionate, with very clear ideas,” he says. Gómez. “One day he told us that he wanted to be a professional footballer and the best in the world.” “We were shocked that such a young child had such clear ideas,” he adds.

And since “he is very intelligent”, he learned Spanish very quickly and understood Catalan perfectly, which was the language used in the locker room. Kubo He became great and passed all the sieves based on goals. He played with soccer players like Ansu Fati o Eric Garcia, but it was he who broke the filmmaker record, with more than 70 ‘txitxarros’ in one year. “He was a ‘killer,’” his coach recalls. “He adapted perfectly to the Barça system and played up front”.

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A brochure in a camp

Kubo he had arrived there in a curious way, which he himself explains. “One day, in Japan, I saw a brochure from a camp that said that if I was the best, I would play a game with Barcelona, ​​and I tried. He was the best in the camp and with Barça. That allowed him to stay four years at La Masía, until the FIFA sanction of the culé club, after which all the minors from other countries left.

“He took training sessions as if it were the most important thing in his life, each training session was life or death,” he says. Alex Gomez about him. Most fall by the wayside, but “that quality and that attitude foreshadowed that he was going to get there yes or yes”. The talent and that “mixture of a Japanese and Latin player” is what made him go far: “He was creative, spontaneous and decisive. He picked up the ball and faced, dribbled, shot. Everything he did was with conviction and serenity, ”says the coach of him.

Due to the sanction, at the age of 14, Kubo He returned to Japan, where he once again broke early records and stood out at FC Tokyo and Yokohama Marinos. By the time Barça went for him when he came of age, Madrid had him armored and convinced with a salary of 1.2 million per year. “I think he will explode in Real”, he predicts Gómez, who remembers that, despite not having triumphed in the First Division, ”when he is regular, he always generates something, creates chances. The opponent can never leave him much space because if he thinks, he messes you up ”. She has come to mess it up. This starts today.