Anthony Gordon can't stop praising Barcelona, and that's fine. What's not fine is the way he keeps doing it: by quietly running down the club that made him worth €80m in the first place.
"I've made plenty of runs throughout my career that nobody saw, but now I've got Pedri, who sees absolutely everything," he told Barcelona's in-house magazine. Nice line about Pedri. Rough one for everyone who played with him before. Someone saw those runs: the teammates who fed him to 10 open-play goals and as many assists in his breakout season, the same ones who found him in a cup final that ended a 70-year wait for a trophy. Gordon has decided, out loud, that none of it counted until a Spaniard started threading him passes.
This is the third or fourth time he's done it. On RAC1 he called Pedri and Frenkie de Jong "the two best players in the world." To ITV, during England camp, he said his football IQ was never respected in England. Each one, on its own, is a happy new signing gushing about his upgrade. Strung together, it stops sounding like excitement and starts sounding like a man reciting a script he's grown to believe.
The bloke just joined Barcelona, of course he's buzzing. You'd be insufferable too, and there's real joy in these interviews, a player rediscovering his game after a grim year.
The reason nobody was raving about Anthony Gordon in his last Newcastle season is that Anthony Gordon was bad. He went more than a year without an open-play Premier League goal before he finally scored in a 4-1 defeat at Liverpool in January. He was a forward in a deep, visible slump. Pedri's absence and a dressing room that failed to notice his movement had nothing to do with it. Spinning it as "my teammates couldn't see my runs" is a tidy way of handing your own bad form to the men you left behind.
Newcastle gave him this move. They bought him from Everton in January 2023, built an attack around him, won a trophy with him in it, and then cashed a £69.3m cheque when Barcelona came calling. The least he owed them was to let the Pedri praise stand on its own without reaching back to diminish them on the way out.
He might be coached to say this stuff. The repetition has the feel of a media operation that knows a new signing talking down his old league plays well with the new crowd. Even so, that's on Gordon for reciting it: nobody puts the words "nobody saw my runs" in your mouth. You choose those.
Enjoy Barcelona, Anthony. Praise Pedri all you like. But the next time you feel the urge to explain how invisible you were before, remember who found you in that cup final. They were watching just fine. You were the one who stopped scoring.
