Ronald Araujo: Barcelona's love story with their charismatic 'future captain' (2024)

When Ronald Araujo arrived at Barcelona he stood out like a sore thumb. He came from a different kind of football and had much less technical quality than his team-mates, most of whom had grown up in La Masia.

Some had their doubts about the Uruguayan defender. Five years later, he is an undisputed starter and one of the new leaders to have emerged in the course of Barca winning this season’s La Liga title.

Ramon Planes was the assistant sporting director who brought him to Catalonia. He knew the Uruguayan market well, and back in 2018 was hearing a lot about a young striker who’d recently been converted to centre-back — a 19-year-old who was playing for Montevideo club Boston River in the country’s top division.

Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid and Villarreal were all after Araujo. Planes, so impressed by the youngster’s energy, persisted until he managed to sign him ahead of them, and Araujo joined Barca Atletic, the club’s reserve side made up primarily of youth players. Despite what some others at the club thought at the time, Planes could see his enormous potential. Time is proving him right.

Araujo’s adaptation was not easy, but what made him stand out — apart from his physique — was his mentality.

Sources familiar with Araujo’s early days in Catalonia — who preferred not to be named in this article so as to protect relationships — say that he wanted to soak up the club’s philosophy from the very first moment. They say he turned down offers from elsewhere precisely for an opportunity to learn according to the Barca school, even if that meant spending a season in the reserves with no future guarantee of a move to the first team.

They describe a player who responds brilliantly to instruction. They say he has always been — and still is, at the age of 24 — receptive to criticism on any aspect of his game in which he can improve.

There were also times when Araujo took the initiative himself.

In his early days at Barca, he bought a cheap inflatable football with the club’s badge on it from a market and would spend nights honing his technique with it after training. He did it in his bedroom, where hanging from the wall was a white sheet of paper that read: “You are going to be the best centre-back in Europe.”

Araujo would spend two years on the books of Barca Atletic, also commonly known as Barca B, but by 2019 he was already being called up to the first team. On October 6 that year, he made his senior debut in a La Liga victory over Sevilla, coming on in the 73rd minute. Fourteen minutes later, he’d been sent off for a challenge on Javier Hernandez when the Mexican was through on goal.

Araujo continued with Barca’s reserves for the majority of 2019-20 but by the July of a campaign that was interrupted by COVID-19, everything had been put in place to register him as a first-team member with a new contract.

He’d played another five times in La Liga since his debut and was now training only with the senior pros, but he still chose to go and play with his old Barca B team-mates in their play-offs for promotion from the Spanish third tier, although they lost in the final to Sabadell.

“I’d been with them all season, we’d fought hard. I told them I wanted to be there and I didn’t think twice about it. It was a shame but I was left with very nice memories,” Araujo said.

After Ronald Koeman was installed as Barca manager in August 2020, Araujo started almost half the team’s La Liga matches over the following campaign, and since 2021-22 only injury or suspension has kept him out of the side. Injury did, unfortunately, rule him out of the World Cup in Qatar.

His approach to the game hasn’t changed; it’s defined by commitment, hard work and humility.

“Being here is a tremendous happiness,” Araujo said on the day he signed an improved new contract, with a €1billion (£867m; $1.07bn) release clause, in April 2022.

“I want to thank all my family, who supported me from the beginning, for this tremendous opportunity. My parents, my wife… I get emotional because we went through a lot.”

By the end, he was speaking through tears.

It can sometimes be a shock to see another person crying, even more so if the person is a 6ft 2in (188cm) athlete dressed impeccably in a tuxedo. But there he was, standing, and weeping, on the Camp Nou pitch after extending terms to 2026. He’d come a long way.

Araujo was born and raised in the Mandubi neighbourhood of Rivera, a small town hugging Uruguay’s border with Brazil. He always proudly recalls his humble past and in several interviews, he has explained the difficulties his family went through before he was able to make a living from sport.

His mother and father worked hard bringing up their three children. His mum — who is Brazilian — sold fried pastries at the Huracan de Rivera club, where the footballer started out.

“At home sometimes we didn’t have enough money to buy shoes or food,” he told the Spanish newspaper El Periodico.

“I remember one day we only had pasta and mayonnaise to eat. That’s something that makes me take more advantage of the opportunities I have now. I know it’s not easy to get here and I want to make the most of it.

“I remember once I didn’t have boots to play football and my mother had to ask for a payment in instalments so that I could have them. It took her eight or nine months to pay for them but I had my boots. It was a very big effort that my parents made, and I am very grateful to them.”

Araujo has on several occasions been asked by Barca to give talks to the club’s youth players. In these talks, he’s tried to make them aware of how lucky they are. He has sought to downplay the value of new cars or excessive luxuries, explaining to these kids in their late teens the value of living in comfort, and the great fortune they already have in being able to work doing something they love.

Barca see him as a future captain, and they have made this known to the player himself. Now that Sergio Busquets is leaving, it’s likely he will be voted in as one of the team’s four captains (they have a captain and three official vice-captains). After Busquets, Jordi Alba, Sergi Roberto and Marc-Andre ter Stegen are the current other three.

You could see exactly why Barca view him this way on Sunday, after the pitch invasion that followed their 4-2 win at Espanyol, where they were crowned La Liga champions.

Among the group of players and staff celebrating in the centre circle, Araujo was one of the first to notice what was happening. He started to run off, encouraging his team-mates to do so too. When he got close to the mouth of the tunnel, he stopped and waited to make sure everyone else entered safely, before he, too, headed for the dressing rooms.

The Barca squad was strengthened last summer, especially at the back, with the additions of Marcos Alonso, Hector Bellerin, Andreas Christensen and Jules Kounde. But Araujo is Xavi’s preferred option at the heart of his defence.

Even in the first part of the season, when the manager was still experimenting with his defensive line-up, the common denominator was always Araujo, even before Gerard Pique, who last season was the team’s No 1 centre-back.

Araujo isn’t the most active defender, but he is very effective when he does engage, as shown in the graphic below.

His 3.2 true tackles per 1,000 touches is very low (true tackles represent the total number of tackles plus challenges lost and fouls committed), and his true interceptions also show a low score compared to La Liga’s other centre-backs (true interceptions include interceptions and blocked passes).

But his 81.3 per cent true tackle win rate is the best in the division of any outfield player, showing just how strong he is at winning the ball back when he does go in for a challenge.

In terms of being dribbled past, Araujo has only been beaten three times this entire season so far — twice by Real Madrid’s Vinicius Junior and once by Rayo Vallecano’s Alvaro Garcia. Both of those occasions came when Araujo was playing at right-back — he hasn’t been dribbled past this season while playing at centre-back.

A source close to Araujo, who preferred not to be named in order to protect relationships, described him to The Athletic as a football obsessive who reviews every game he plays, and as somebody who follows stats closely and is always looking to improve them. They said Araujo has phoned them on several occasions, commenting on how many games had passed since anyone had dribbled past him, challenging himself to keep the run going.

“He is the most improved player since we arrived at the club,” Xavi said of Araujo last year.

“If we speak about defensive abilities, we know who he is: one of the most powerful defenders in the world. And he is daring to do more and more stuff on the ball.”

The stats back this up, too. Araujo has averaged 7.4 passes into the final third this campaign, improving on the averages of 5.0, 4.3 and 5.0 in his previous three seasons. Regarding the progression of Barca’s play from the back, only two La Liga centre-backs have made more carries of 10-plus metres per game than Arauajo’s 6.2 average: Villarreal’s Pau Torres and Raul Albiol. And Araujo’s metrics are again up on previous seasons, having completed around 5.7 such carries per game in 2021-22, and 3.3 the season before.

When Araujo started out at Barca, he would struggle to make what coaches considered a good pass beyond a distance of about five metres. Now he is the one who often initiates their play out from the back.

And this season, the defence has been key. Barca’s most common scoreline this campaign has been 1-0. They have won a joint-record 11 La Liga games by that margin. They wrapped up the title with four games remaining and just 13 goals conceded from their 34 matches so far — the best record in Europe’s big five leagues.

They have kept 25 clean sheets — again unrivalled across Europe’s major leagues. The competition season record is 26, set by Deportivo La Coruna back in 1993–94.

All this helps understand why, at Barca, Araujo has become an essential player, and why he is so loved by Barca supporters. He is one of the few — along with Pedri, Gavi and Ter Stegen — to whom the Camp Nou fans dedicate regular chants. Many compare him to legendary defender Carles Puyol.

On September 17 2022, in a home match against Elche, Araujo was tearing down the wing when he was forced off the pitch, close to where the Barca badge is printed on the sidelines. In order not to step on it, he diverted his run and took a leap to avoid it.

It was taken as a moment that marked the respect he feels for the club.

It’s a respect that is mutual.

Additional contributor: Thom Harris

(Top photo: Angel Martinez/Getty Images. Visual design by Eamonn Dalton.)

Before joining The Athletic as a football writer, Laia Cervelló worked at Diario Sport reporting on FC Barcelona for four years. She has also worked for another four years for BeIN SPORTS Spain and GOLTV. She began her career as a journalist at 'betevé', the public television station in Barcelona, where she spent almost nine years.