With Lionel Messi as captain, Argentina national team won the 2022 World Cup with a squad full of players who had flown under the radar for years before the tournament. After lifting the trophy, a former FC Barcelona prospect revealed that one of his Albiceleste teammates once failed a trial with the club — and did so with a blunt assessment: “He was very bad.”
Back when he was 17 and still part of Boca Juniors’ youth system, Nahuel Molina traveled to Spain for a trial hoping to make the leap to Europe, specifically with one of the game’s biggest clubs. However, one player who did pass that trial, Éric Montes, later claimed Molina fell well short of the standard Barcelona expected.
In an interview with Spanish outlet Post United, Montes recalled details of that trial a decade ago: “During one preseason, three Argentinians came in for trials and didn’t meet the level — they were very bad. I later found out that Nahuel Molina was one of them.”
Even though the identities of the other two Argentines never became public, Montes said none of them matched the club’s expectations to stay. He also highlighted the contrast between his own path and Molina’s. “To show you how things are, he was a ‘Matao.’ Look at the Matao now and look at me,” Montes added, using Spanish football slang for a player considered limited or low-level.
Nahuel Molina of Argentina lifts the World Cup.
While Montes remained at Barcelona’s academy after the trial, he never made his debut in Spain’s first division. In contrast, Molina eventually broke through after joining Atlético Madrid in 2022 and went on to win multiple trophies alongside Messi with Argentina — a striking turnaround from that failed trial in Spain.
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Molina, Montes, and the Barcelona bubble
The careers of Molina and Montes serve as a reminder of how quickly a player’s trajectory can change, even after time inside one of soccer’s most prestigious academies. Though he never debuted for Boca Juniors’ first team, the Argentine right back moved to Europe with Udinese in 2020 before later joining Atlético Madrid to then conquer the World Cup, while Montes’ career took a far different path.
He never broke into Barcelona’s senior squad and instead went on loan to lower-division Spanish clubs such as Peralada, Cultural Leonesa, Albacete, Gimnàstic, and Manresa before retiring at 27 because of a serious knee injury. “You leave the Barcelona bubble and start to realize what real life is,” he reflected.
