Anthony Gordon’s argument is short. In the Premier League, he ran and he pressed, and that was as far as English opinion of him tended to go. In La Liga, he says, the coaching and the crowd read him differently.

“I think I’ve become a different player in the eyes of a lot of people because in England I always felt that I was respected for being fast and pressing, but they never really respected the quality and intelligence with which I play,” the winger told ITV Sport.

“Only the players I played with seemed to realise that.”

Gordon left Newcastle at the end of May, when Barcelona signed him for £69.3m (€80m inclusive of add-ons) and handed him a five-year contract.

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The old label and the new one

The 25-year-old’s frustration, as he framed it to ITV Sport, is about what people were prepared to notice.

“I don’t think I was ever fully respected in England. People just see me as someone who’s very fast and very aggressive, whereas in Spain they really appreciate my intelligence and my quality.”

“At Barcelona, if you’re not skilful or intelligent, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb straight away.”

He was blunt about why he wanted the move in the first place.

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“Yes, and to be honest, that was exactly what I was looking for. I wanted to leave the Premier League, I wanted a different experience and that was exactly what I was after.”

Assists rather than goals so far

The output backs up part of the pitch. Gordon has four assists in his first six La Liga matches for Hansi Flick’s side. A first competitive goal for Barcelona is still to come, and Flick has publicly backed his off-ball contribution while it does.

The recognition point is not academic for Gordon this week. On Saturday he scored in England’s 2-3 defeat to Spain at Wembley, Thomas Tuchel’s first Nations League fixture of the new campaign, in a game where Harry Kane also struck the bar with a second-half penalty. Gordon was released through on goal by Jude Bellingham after a rapid break from a corner and slotted low into the corner to equalise before half-time.

Before the match he had already argued that England were trying too hard to look like Spain, telling reporters they were “English and we have our own strengths which they don’t have”. His comments to ITV Sport, aired days later, push that argument one step closer to himself.

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England play Czechia in Prague on Tuesday evening, followed by Croatia in Rijeka on Saturday, 3 October.

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