Ebrima Tunkara: The 16-Year-Old Flick Has Tried at False Nine
In mid-May, Ebrima Tunkara was told he would be spending the summer training under Hansi Flick. Three months on he is still there — scoring in a behind-closed-doors friendly against Europa, starting against Birmingham City at St Andrew’s, taking his turn in the triangular in Udine. Somewhere in the middle of it his agent, Pini Zahavi, passed through Barcelona, met Joan Laporta and took his 16-year-old client out to dinner. It has been, as Mundo Deportivo put it, a dream of a summer.
Flick did not call Tunkara up expecting to solve a first-team problem with him. He called him up to look at him properly. But the timing is unusually interesting. Robert Lewandowski has gone to Chicago Fire, Ferran Torres has left for Paris Saint-Germain, and a summer that brought in Anthony Gordon, Karim Adeyemi and Jesse Bisiwu has not yet produced a like-for-like No 9. A teenager who is comfortable through the middle has walked in front of the manager at the one moment he was always going to be looked at twice.
What Ebrima Tunkara brings
Tunkara made five appearances for Barça Atlètic last season and looked a touch shy in them, without the freedom he shows for Juvenil A. That has not been the case with the first team. Mundo Deportivo describe a player in constant movement — feinting, turning lightly, slipping away from opponents and then running at them with the ball. The weakness, by the same account, is that he does not ask for possession often enough. The strength is what happens once he has it.
Context helps, too. Barça arrived at the triangular physically wrung out after a heavy block of pre-season work, and in that setting a 16-year-old’s legs stood out more than they would in a normal August.
The false nine experiment
Flick has mostly used him as an interior — the central midfield role in which he is most comfortable — and occasionally on the right wing, where he spent much of last season with Juvenil A. More intriguing is what the manager has tried on top of that: Tunkara as a false nine, first in a training match and then, per Diario Sport via Barça Blaugranes, in the 4-1 closed-doors win over Europa in which he scored.
That is a coach auditioning a player rather than picking one, and it says something about what Flick thinks he is looking at. He was clear enough about it during the training camp in England, calling the teenager a “great talent”.
No rush at La Masia
Nobody inside the club wants to skip steps with him, and there is good reason for the caution. Recent summers have taught Culers how quickly a La Masia name can go from novelty to necessity — and how easily one can be worn out on the way there. The club has been busy at that end of the building, weighing up La Masia sales while tying down the ones it rates, as it did with Marc Bernal.
Tunkara will almost certainly start the season with Juvenil A and Barça Atlètic, and that is the right place for him. But he has spent a summer inside Flick’s field of vision, signed his first professional contract and given the manager a reason to keep the file open. For a 16-year-old, that is the entire point of a pre-season. Ebrima Tunkara has made his.
