AS are today reporting that Barcelona have made a number of changes to their club policy on what players can and can’t do off the pitch as they battle a wave of injuries that threatens to derail their season.
It’s a very long reel of players currently struggling: Robert Lewandowski, Frenkie de Jong, Jules Kounde, Pedri, Ronald Araujo, Raphinha… the list goes on. Some are worse than others, some from training and some from games, but it’s an unsustainable situation.
The club are at panic stations, and have decided on some extreme solutions in terms of banning players from certain activities – including padel, basketball and unsupervised gym work in the players’ free time.
Those will be added to the existing list of banned activities which most clubs have – skiing, mountain biking and so on. It all feels a little desperate – none of these problems came from playing padel, that’s for sure.
The only thing Barcelona have going for them right now is that Madrid are in a similar injury crisis – although Los Blancos seem to be on the way out of theirs, while Barca’s gets ever deeper.
