French "League" wrote an article today to review the frustrations encountered by Ekitic while playing for Paris Saint-Germain.
After a successful season at Reims (28 appearances in various competitions and 11 goals), Ekitic, who is only 20 years old, joined Paris Saint-Germain in the summer of 2022. Here, Ekitic meets players like Messi, Neymar and Mbappe: he is entering a whole new world.
Ekitic joined Paris Saint-Germain in 2022 and invested 28.5 million euros to introduce Ekitic. The signing surprised fans at the time. However, Paris director Luis Campos, who initially insisted on introducing Ekitic, firmly believed that within two years, he could train the No. 9 player who was fast, creative, and able to take the ball back and retreat into a world-class player.
However, eighteen months later (including the last six months of being hiding), the Portuguese director finally admitted that the signing failed, but still revealed to some insiders that he believed Ekitic would be reborn in other teams.
Luis Campos
Now it seems that Campos's original judgment was correct. Why has this striker never gained a foothold in Paris? In an interview with The Team in March, Ekitic admitted: "To be honest, I could have done better, but they didn't help me. They didn't give me confidence. They never really took the time to communicate with me and help me. Even in the game, I had to think about how to run so as not to get in the way of this or that player, so that the team would run normally. But I learned a lot."
That summer, Ekitic had to adapt to a brand new environment and a brand new identity when he came to Paris - as a young player, he had to be patient. The then 20-year-old striker possesses all the characteristics of this generation: they do not doubt their talents and are eager to play immediately.
But the bench was frustrated by him in the first few weeks and his debut at Princes Park was not going well. Ekitic performed too much and his confidence faded, and he had to wait three months to score his first goal.
Several months have passed, and Ekitic's sense of frustration is increasing day by day. In the locker room, the young genius spoke out loudly. The criticism of fans and commentators is sometimes quite sharp, and the parties involved are never able to understand this kind of harshness that seems unreasonable to him. During the 1396-minute playing time in the first season, he handed in 4 goals and 4 assists. At this time, the management had already thought of giving up.
The failed transfer operation at the end of August 2023 (Note: The transfer originally scheduled to join Frankfurt failed at the last moment) made the relationship between the two sides worse. Although Ekitic had a brilliant performance in the early days of Louis Enrique's coaching Japan preseason, he was eventually thrown into the "cold palace" and failed to get a chance to play for half a year.
Ekitic mentioned this experience and said, "I understood at that time that I would do my best to prove that this experience was not a mistake. I have the ability to make a comeback." A year and a half later, the Frenchman succeeded in Frankfurt. Now, he is about to return to the sight of giant fans. However, this time, his identity was completely different.
