Football rarely bothers with subtlety when it wants to write a coincidence. Gabriel Jesus is in line to make his Champions League debut for Barcelona against Feyenoord at the Spotify Camp Nou on Wednesday night — and, as Mundo Deportivo have pointed out, Feyenoord are the very same opponents he faced when he made his Champions League debut in the first place. That night, nine years ago almost to the day, he scored.
Gabriel Jesus’s Champions League debut: Rotterdam, 2017
The date was 13 September 2017. The venue was De Kuip in Rotterdam, in Group F of the 2017/18 competition, and the shirt was Manchester City’s. Jesus was 20 years old — a little older than Lamine Yamal is now — and he had arrived in Europe from Palmeiras, where he broke into the first team in 2015/16, with Pep Guardiola’s City having pushed hardest to sign him.
City won 4-0, and Jesus got the third. He had already been denied inside the opening minutes by Brazilian centre-back Eric Botteghin, but he did not miss the next invitation. On 25 minutes a corner broke down into chaos in the Feyenoord six-yard box: shots from Sergio Agüero and Benjamin Mendy were scrambled clear by goalkeeper Brad Jones, and Jesus was the one alert enough to finish the job. Agüero and John Stones, with two, completed the rout.
There is a small extra symmetry in there for the Blaugrana. Agüero, Jesus’s strike partner that evening, would himself pass through Barcelona a few years later before his career was cut short by heart problems.
The Camp Nou move that nearly happened a decade ago
What makes the coincidence sharper is that Jesus came close to being a Barça player back then. Speaking around his presentation at the club, the Brazilian said that Barcelona had been in the picture when he left Palmeiras almost ten years ago, only for City — Guardiola in the early, ravenous stage of his Manchester project — to win the race.
He has taken the long route, then, but he has arrived. Jesus joined from Arsenal on deadline day on a contract running to 2029 and was handed the No.9 shirt, the number that had been waiting for an owner since Robert Lewandowski left in the summer. A European debut in Blaugrana against the club he first announced himself against in this competition is about as neat an opening as the fixture list could manage.
Barça and Feyenoord: a tie with history
Wednesday is not the first meaningful night these two clubs have shared. Carles Rexach, writing in Mundo Deportivo this week, revisited the 1974/75 European Cup tie in which Barcelona knocked out a Feyenoord side who were then the great domestic rivals of Johan Cruyff’s Ajax. Rexach scored a hat-trick in the home leg — all three from Cruyff crosses, one of them, unusually for him, with his head — in what he still calls one of the most beautiful nights of his career.
The context has changed beyond recognition. Then, only league champions entered the competition and Barcelona were fourteen seasons removed from the final in Berne, deep in what Rexach describes as a trek through the desert. Now Hansi Flick’s side open a 36-team league phase with 17 goals from their first four matches behind them and a manager who told his pre-match press conference that Barcelona “have the capacity to win it”, while urging calm about a very long road ahead.
What to expect on Wednesday
Whether Jesus starts is another question — Flick has an in-form front line, and Feyenoord, under Giovanni van Bronckhorst, arrive having conceded freely in the Eredivisie despite scoring 13 goals in five league games. Our predicted line-up and team news has the fuller picture. But whenever the No.9 does step onto the grass in this competition for Barcelona, it will be against opponents he has already scored past on the biggest European night of his young career.
Kick-off at the Spotify Camp Nou is 18:45 CEST (17:45 BST) on Wednesday 9 September. The 2017 coincidence was first spotted by Mundo Deportivo.
