The trend in the world of football today is to reward promising or high-level young players with comparisons to ex-world stars. Every now and then, the "new Cantona", "new Maradona" or "new Henri" appear here and there, but, alas, only a few grow to the greatness of their protégé. Bright stars sometimes go out as quickly as they lit up in the football sky, and in a few years a player who has already been forgotten about may well be part of an outsider, trying with his last strength to maintain a residence permit in the top division. However, fate often gives gifted football players a second chance, and whether they take it or not is a matter of ambition, desire and opportunity.
New Messi
Croatian attacking midfielder Alen Halilovic has been playing football at a professional level for the fifth season, and meanwhile the player is only 21 years old. Thanks to his bright individual qualities, extraordinary thinking and excellent dribbling, the Croat at a fairly young age began to be compared withthe main star of the Spanish La Liga and the Argentina national team - Lionel Messi.
Khalilovich Alen is a native of Croatian Dubrovnik. In his youth, he got into the youth team of Dinamo Zagreb, a club that gave European and world football a lot of top-level players.
Halilovich made his debut for the capital club in 2012 at the age of 16. It is symbolic that the first minutes of the young Croat on the football field fell on the match with the principal rival and the eternal enemy of Dynamo - Hajduk. The Zagreb club in that confrontation won a confident victory with a score of 3-1, and just a few days later, Alen Halilovic scored his first goal in a duel against Slaven Belupo. This event was not at all ordinary, because the young midfielder broke the Croatian championship record and became the youngest scorer in its history. In the autumn of the same year, the football player played his first few minutes in the most prestigious European tournament - the Champions League.
Moving to Spain
The bright extraordinary game of the Dynamo attacking midfielder attracted the attention of many European top clubs, but the most specific was in the actions of the Catalan "Barcelona". The European giant signed the Croat to a five-year contract in the spring of 2014. The midfielder never played for the first team of the Blue Garnet, but he had a great season at Barcelona B.
Loan at Sporting
In Catalonia, they perfectly understood that it was blasphemy - to “pickle” such a talent as Alain Halilovich on the bench. midfielder, however,still did not fall into the basis of the Blaugranas, so the management of Barcelona decided to send the Croat to gain experience in Sporting Gijon.
Gijón met the rising star with open arms, and the football player paid the attention of the local public with the same coin. Alen Halilovich in the 2015-2016 season. spent 35 matches for Sporting and again made representatives of the writing fraternity speak about themselves. In the press every now and then flashed news about the interest in the Croatian footballer from English and Spanish clubs, the more surprising it was to find the name of Alen in the list of summer transfers of the German "Hamburg" - a team, no doubt, with a great history, but which has been very feverish lately.
Reboot
"Dinosaurs" for several seasons in a row only in the last matches escaped from relegation from the elite of German football, and the 2016-2017 season was no exception. Alen Halilovic was one of those players who were acquired as a point reinforcement of the team, but from the first days in Germany it became clear that this was not the kind of championship in which the midfielder would feel like a fish in water.
In the winter of 2017, Halilovic found himself on loan again, this time with a modest La Liga representative, Las Palmas. It is not yet clear what results this decision will bring, but sports experts call it a kind of career reset, of course, a talented football player. Well, time will tell.
