Credit: Goal.com<\/p><\/div>\n
Spanish and Barcelona legend Andres Iniesta turns 36 today. Let’s have trip down memory lane to see how the Spanish midfielder became one of the greatest midfielders of all time.<\/p>\n
Iniesta joined the Barcelona Academy from Albacete Balompie in July 1996 for an unknown fee. Iniesta climbed through all of the youth ranks from U17 all the way to the senior team where he signed his professional contract for Barca in 2002.<\/p>\n
That season the relatively new midfielder to the team played nine games and assisted on one ocassion, but was only just getting grips with the game as his confidence and ability grew.<\/p>\n
The 2003\/04 season would see Iniesta play in almost double the amount of games he played the previous season. Playing 17 times, scoring on two occasions and assisting four times showed the Spaniard’s sharp progress.<\/p>\n
The next season saw Iniesta play in 46 games as he became a key midfielder in Barcelona’s team of the 04\/05 season.<\/p>\n
The 2005\/06 season gave Iniesta a total of 49 more games under his belt, his highest total of appearances up to this point in his career. His assist and goal contributions remained modest but Iniesta started to use his range of passes to really impress the Camp You crowd.<\/p>\n
The next two years saw Iniesta a regular in an ever-improving Barcelona team as the Spaniard recorded over 100 games over the two campaigns.<\/p>\n
The 2008\/09 season produced four goals and 17 \u00a0assists in an all time best in his career at the time.<\/p>\n
Always recording over 40 appeared per season throughout his career, new heights were reached by the midfielder in the 2012\/13 season. He played close to 50 appearances that season scoring six goals and providing 22 assists in the whole season which was a great achievement for the player.<\/p>\n
The Spaniard continued to notch up appearances in a Barca shirt, famously being part of the team managed by Pep Guardiola envied by all of Europe.<\/p>\n
The 2017\/18 season proved to be Iniesta’s last in the Barcelona shirt. Iniesta made 44 appearances in that season, but altogether made 674 appearances for Barcelona scoring 57 goals and assisting 140 times in the process. A true legend left the club that summer to go to Vissel Kobe on a free transfer.<\/p>\n
He’s still currently at Vissel Kobe and he’s played 44 times for the Japanese club scoring ten times and assisting on 13 occasions.<\/p>\n
His international career is extraordinary in a sense that he has played over 130 games for the Spanish national team and has pretty much won everything you can as a player.<\/p>\n
Iniesta’s trophy cabinet must be pretty full with all the trophies he has won with Barca and with Spain. He’s won: Spanish Footballer of the Year, Spanish Player of the Year, Japanese Supercup winner, Japanese Cup winner, 3x UEFA Supercup winner, 7x Spanish Supercup winner, 3x FIFA Club World Cup winner, 9x Spanish Champion, 6x Spanish Cup winner, 2x European Champion, 4x Champions League winner, World Cup winner and UEFA Best Player in Europe.<\/p>\n
Iniesta has had an amazing career and will go down in history as one of the best midfielders of all time.<\/p>\n
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\n[\/columns]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today we celebrate the birthday’s of two great players, Real Madrid goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois and FC Barcelona legend Andres Iniesta.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":229099,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[796,111,65,117,212,355,59,12,42],"tags":[598,2566,2551,137,2565,2567,2568],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prostinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prostinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prostinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prostinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prostinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/prostinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prostinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prostinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prostinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prostinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}