Controlling the Uncontrollable

Behind the smile 

This isn’t a book about soccer. It doesn’t talk about the career of a highly gifted youth, or his success at one of world’s greatest clubs. It doesn’t analyze that smiling adolescent who first set foot in Camp Nou before coming of age.  

These pages are a journey into a player’s mind. The mind of a person who in reality are two people: the one seen on the pitch, living his dream, enjoying a privileged life, and the other who speaks frankly about a different, invisible reality that suffocated him the moment he stepped off the playing field: the vortex of anxiety, anguish and loneliness that ended up affecting his ability to play soccer. That was when Bojan defeated Bojan. And Bojan, for the first time, tells all.  

Along with the player’s first-person account, these pages are full of comments and observations by family members, his psychoanalyst, Dr. Josep Montseny, and a range of notable people from the world of soccer: Joan Laporta, Gerard Piqué, Andrés Iniesta, Frank Rikjaard and Txiki Bergiristain. Together, they paint a portrait of a youth who landed in the dizzying world of professional soccer without the necessary tools to manage all the things that came with this.