Last summer, Argentina youth international Bruno Zuculini joined the then-recently crowned Premier League champions Manchester City with high hopes of eventually breaking into Manuel Pellegrini’s first-team squad and becoming a regular first-team player for the Blues. However, not all has gone to plan for the 22-year-old.
Some City fans who are reading this may not be aware of who Zuculini is and others won’t have been aware that the central midfielder still plays for the Citizens and that’s what went wrong in the youngster’s career. He hasn’t been remembered.
The one thing that all fans hope when a prodigy signs is that he makes an immediate impact, much like Kelechi Iheanacho, who scored an injury-time winner against Crystal Palace on Saturday in just his second Premier League appearance. Zuculini failed to do this. His string of mundane performances in City’s 2014/15 pre-season tours of Scotland and USA saw him depart on a season-long loan to Spanish side Valencia.
City fans who followed that transfer would have thought that the fact that such a high-profile club wanted the former Racing Club star on loan was a positive thing, but it completely backfired. After making just one appearance for Los Che, his loan was terminated in January 2015. The Champions League qualifiers overperformed last season and that could have been one reason, but the Argentine’s horrific season didn’t end there.
Cordoba. A drop from Valencia to Cordoba. No offensive to any Cordoba fans, but that is one hell of a drop. That shows how teams lost interest during that six-month period where he wasn’t seen. The first sign of a forgotten man. I’m going to reference him again but Iheanacho played a massive part of City’s International Champions Cup campaign last year and didn’t actually sign at the Etihad until February this year. Between those two dates though, the Blues’ fans were constantly enquiring about his future on social media – that’s a massive step-up from the attention that Zuculini got.
So, playing for Cordoba, Zuculini had a chance to prove himself as the instigator of their top-flight survival. You guessed it, the opposite happened, Zuculini acted as an anchor that held the Spanish side at the bottom of the league and dragged them back to the depths of Liga Adelante. His awful season didn’t end there, as he was then named in Marca’s La Liga flop XI for the season.
Zuculini has returned to the Etihad this summer to find his presence overshadowed by an eventful summer after their limp defence of their Premier League crown, finging himself further down the pecking order at the Etihad campus than this time last season. Granted that it isn’t entirely Zuculini’s fault that the two-time Premier League winners have invested big money in signing world-class players. However, the ex-Argentine U20 international has failed to find himself a club to join on loan and has been left out of Manuel Pellegrini’s Premier League and Champions League squad. Unless a Football League club decides to launch an interest in his services, it could be a long six months at the Etihad for the once highly-rated midfielder.
Bruno Zuculini – remember that name, if you can. For he is the forgotten man.
