Could John Guidetti be Manchester City's cut-price road to success?
The 19-year-old Swede who grew up playing with elephants in Kenya is a goalscoring sensation for Feyenoord while on loan from Manchester City
Have Manchester City got it wrong? The player who says he has been treated like a dog is back with the squad while the man they call "The Rhino" stays on loan at Feyenoord, scoring hat-trick after hat-trick.
John Guidetti is a young City striker who has now scored a remarkable 17 goals in 15 games in the Netherlands, three of them coming in a 4-2 win over Ajax. He is being monitored by Bayern Munich and a host of Italian clubs and at a time when all the talk is of financial fair play, the Swedish 19-year-old offers City a tantalising glimpse of a low-cost future.
The three goals against Vitesse Arnhem at the weekend represented Guidetti's third hat-trick in four games. The Feyenoord fans adore him and almost 30,000 have signed a petition for the club to keep him. Such a coup will be difficult, however, with the coach, Ronald Koeman, admitting: "We don't have any possibility to buy him really. Everything will depend on what City want to do."
Guidetti's agent, Per Jonsson, told Swedish paper Expressen this week: "There are a lot of big clubs making contact at the moment regarding John, a lot of them. I am not going to reveal any names but I have never experienced anything like it as an agent. It is crazy and we are not talking about small clubs either. What it amounts to in the end, and what is best for John, we will have to wait and see. John is loving it at Feyenoord at the moment. He loves the club, the fans, his whole existence in the Netherlands. He feels like he has come home. But at the same time he is always striving forwards and I am convinced that Feyenoord will not be his last stop. This is only the beginning, I can promise that."
Guidetti's story is a fascinating one. He spent two large chunks of his childhood in Kenya, where his father moved to run a schools project. In Kenya he grew up playing street football in the slums outside Nairobi. He says he built up his extraordinary physique – he has been likened to Wayne Rooney and Carlos Tevez – there, playing and training at high altitude. He played until his feet bled and there are some extraordinary pictures of him playing football with elephants. His time in Kenya, no doubt, shaped him and made him the player he is today.
"In Sweden football is more about having the right position, to do the right thing all the time, but down there it is not like that at all. It is a different world. You run, you fight and you run – it's as if you are at war actually," he told Swedish football magazine Offside.
When the family moved back to Sweden, he played for Brommapojkarna before Sven-Goran Eriksson beat off competition from Sampdoria, Ajax and Inter to sign the then 16-year-old in 2008. A loan spell back to BP followed as well as goals for City's Under-18 team before he was included in the senior squad to go on the pre-season tour to America in 2010.
He made his competitive debut in the Carling Cup win against West Bromwich Albion in September 2010 – his only game for City so far – before a loan spell with Burnley. There was brief controversy last summer when his development contract with City ran out and Twente thought they had agreed a contract with him but it ended with the young striker signing a three-year deal with the Premier League club.
The loan spell at Feyenoord could not have gone better. Patrick Vieira, City's football development executive, has been to see him this season and he has the second best goal-per-game average in the history of the Eredivisie, beating players such as Marco van Basten, Ronaldo, Romário, Mateja Kezman, Luis Suárez and Pierre van Hooijdonk. The only player he does not beat? Afonso Alves, the man who showed so emphatically that just because you can score in the Eredivisie it does not mean you will make it big in England.
Guidetti, meanwhile, is trying to keep a low profile (well, as low as anyone with a Twitter account called @superguidetti can aim for) and let his goals speak for themselves. The Swede has decided to scale down his media commitments amid a clamour for him to be included in Sweden's squad to face Croatia at the end of the month. The Sweden national coach, Erik Hamren, has been urged to act quickly to fend off any interest from the Italian FA as Guidetti's father, Mike, has Italian heritage.
Guidetti Jr, however, has indicated that he wants to represent Sweden and sees international football as the next step in his quest to become one of the best players in the world. And he still sees City as the perfect platform to achieve his aims. "I am not the one who is going to decide my future; that is up to the Manchester City board to do," he said at the weekend. "If they think I should play at City then that is an easy decision for them to make. That is my aim, to play in the Premier League for Manchester City."
In the meantime, the confident 19-year-old has some short-term targets: "I hoped that I would play well when I got here [Rotterdam] but this is much better than I could have hoped for. Now I want to win the league title as a thank you to all our fantastic fans." Next season City fans may get to hear the same message from "The Rhino", the unassuming Swede who grew up and Kenya and used to play football with the elephants. In the meantime, they have got Carlos Tevez back.
