It’s been everything but a joyful five years for Samuel Umtiti in Barcelona since he arrived from Lyon in 2016.Lots of injuries, illness, bad relations with some of the coaches. It all led to – it seemed at one moment – an inevitable exit for him. Barcelona’s boardroom didn’t even show signs of hesitation to release their 27-year-old centre-back, especially in the last couple of weeks with their backs to the wall in terms of financial situation.But all those things came to an end after Umtiti – born in Cameroon in 1993 before moving to France – had a long and dreadful, face-to-face conversation with the Blaugrana chairman Joan Laporta.Joan Laporta (©Pedro Salado/Quality Sport Images/Getty Images)According to Marca, the result of those talks is that Samuel Umtiti will stay with Barcelona this season.”It was a very tense meeting, but in which, in the end, the footballer achieved his goal, which was to stay.”The other, Barcelona-based newspaper El Mundo Deportivo reveals that the player ”collapsed in front of the president and began to cry.””First, there was a lot of tension between the two when Laporta blamed him for having played so little in recent years. Umtiti defended himself, saying that the club’s doctors had been wrong in treating his injury.”Laporta believed the footballer’s version and agreed to let him stay in the team. He assured him that he would talk to the coach to be sensitive to Umtiti’s situation. It was at that moment that Umtiti began to cry as a result of the tension and emotions,” the above-mentioned newspaper reported.##EDITORS_CHOICE##At the same time, Umtiti’s former Quique Setien, who sat in the Barca’s dugout during most of 2020, opens up for the Spanish media for the first time. He says he’s so fed up with coaching after that disastrous Camp Nou episode that ended in a trial for unpaid salaries.Quique Setien in Barca’s dugout (©REUTERS/Rafael Marchante/Pool)”You find yourself in a changing room that is not happy. I don’t know if it was because of the club’s trajectory, but I didn’t see a changing room like the one I have experienced in most of my sporting career,” explained Setien for Jot Down magazine and aded:”It is true that when it comes to the league issue, you may think that it is the coach’s fault… but everyone there knew that the fault was not mine. I can have a percentage of fault, like everyone else, but there anyone would have failed.”Barcelona has been suffering for many years, you just have to see it. It was already known that a tremendous regeneration was needed in the club if everyone knew it there, but there was no capacity, not even financial, to do anything.##NAJAVA_MECA_5797633##”They never told me that I was not continuing. I heard the president on television make a statement, and the sports director, Abidal, invited me for lunch the next day and wanted to convince me to forgive them money. We got along very well, and we had had a lot of contacts, he was a hell of a guy, and I told him: ‘Look, you better not get involved in this. I’m not going to go in either. It’s going to be the lawyers …’.”But no one ever called me. Nobody officially told me that I was fired. After 40 days, I received a dismissal letter because the deadlines were met, and there I already filed a complaint that is in court waiting for the trial to begin,” concludes Setien.
