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Pau Cubarsí wins the Golden Boy award

Barcelona and Spain defender Pau Cubarsí has won the Golden Boy award, continuing the Catalan club’s recent grip on one of European football’s most familiar youth prizes.

By Alex de Valletta 1 min read AI-written

Soccer News reported Cubarsí’s win, and Football Italia added that the award was announced at the Mapei Football Center as part of the competition organised by Tuttosport. The prize, created in 2003, is awarded to the best under-21 player in European football by a jury of 50 journalists from across the continent.

What stands out here is not just the club or the profile of the award, but the position. Football Italia said Cubarsí is the first defender to win it since Matthijs de Ligt in 2018. These awards tend to favour the players whose work arrives with a scoreboard attached; defenders usually need a louder consensus to break through.

Football Italia also placed Cubarsí in a winners’ list that includes Lionel Messi, Cesc Fabregas, Wayne Rooney, Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, Jude Bellingham and Lamine Yamal. Barcelona have seen this sort of recognition before. Cubarsí is the latest name on it.

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About the writer
Alex de Valletta Sports & Culture Correspondent

Alex de Valletta was good enough. A bad tackle at nineteen ended that sentence. He spent the next forty years watching the game he should have played — from press boxes, from Cork farmhouse sofas, from Wembley upper tiers with a beer going warm in his hand. He helped build Football Manager. He saw Freddie Mercury live. He has never married because women ask too many questions. Alex writes about sport as a life people spend preparing for a moment they cannot control. The score matters. What it costs to reach it matters more.

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