Chelsea look to have secured the signing of a player who was a talisman during an astonishing career at the Camp Nou, even if he was rarely first choice

It had to be you. There were a few minutes to go before the start of the European Super Cup final when Barcelona’s sporting director Robert Fernández spoke to TV3 television and said Pedro had told him he wanted to leave, concluding: “This might be his last game.” There were even fewer minutes to go before the end of last week’s European Super Cup final against Sevilla when the ball dropped inside the six-yard box. In a flash, someone was there, lifting the ball over Beto and into the net. Pedro, of course.

Neymar had mumps but Pedro had still begun the game on the bench. The night before Luis Enrique said Pedro had a muscular problem. More tellingly, he added: “And you all know his situation.” If they did not, Fernández’s words confirmed it. Barcelona had not planned to play him at all, judging that they did not need him, but now they did. It was 4-4 and way after midnight. Pedro was introduced after 95 minutes; 10 minutes later he scored. Barcelona had won the European Super Cup; the “sextuple” was alive.

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A week later it wasn’t, a crushing 5-1 aggregate defeat against Athletic Bilbao in the Spanish Super Cup ending the dream. Then, on Wednesday, Chelsea activated Pedro’s buyout clause and the player flew to London for a medical. He appears to be finally leaving.

At least, for Pedro, he was involved the season Barça did manage to win all six trophies on offer. He had played a single minute in the 2009 Champions League final, one of 14 appearances that season, and he did not officially have a first-team contract until early in the 2009-10 campaign, but in 2009 he achieved a unique record – he scored in all six competitions.

He scored the winning goal against Shakhtar Donetsk in the 2009 European Super Cup, in the 115th minute – same game, same time, same result as last week against Sevilla which proved, fittingly, to be his last goal for Barça. He has come full circle. In between that goal and this one there has been success and lots of it: five league titles, three Copa del Rey, three Champions Leagues, three European Super Cups. Oh, and the World Cup and European Championship too. The World Cup final came within two years of him having won the third division title; he had never even played for Spain before the squad was named.

When Pedro made his debut for CD Raqui in Tenerife, where his father still worked on a petrol station forecourt, his nickname was “mascot” because of his size. He arrived at Barcelona in August 2004, two days after his 16th birthday, but by 2007 technical staff suggested he be released. Guardiola’s arrival changed that. Promotion with Barcelona B followed, and then the first team. His first season, still officially as part of the B team, ended with a treble; his next began with three more trophies.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pedro scores the opening goal for Barcelona in the 2011 Champions League final at Wembley against Manchester United. Photograph: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images

Four months after that goal against Donetsk, Pedro scored the 89th-minute equaliser in the World Club Cup final against Argentina’s Estudiantes. He has scored in clásicos, one of them a virtual title-winner, in the European Cup final and in the Copa del Rey final. When Barcelona needed him, he had a happy habit of turning up, as was shown once again against Sevilla. “Pedro has an angel,” as the phrase goes.

“Víctor Valdés says I have a flower in my bum,” he admitted after the World Cup. Rectal foliage is a Spanish way of saying he’s lucky. As Xavi said: “It’s not normal to achieve in a year what the rest of us took an entire career to do.” But it is not luck; the evidence became too great. Last week, against Sevilla, he scored his 99th goal, averaging just under one every three games.

“It’s time we took Pedro seriously,” Guardiola had said after he scored in a 2-0 win at the Bernabéu in April 2010, taking Barcelona top and effectively clinching the title. It may be five years ago now, yet somehow the sentiment still carries some relevance even though Guardiola was right when he said Pedro would “write history here, in golden letters”. Twenty-two trophies he has won.



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Sometimes you watch Pedro and it’s not clear what he has got, but he has certainly got something. A kind of electricity, for a start. There is an intensity to his game that fitted Guardiola’s team perfectly; when it came to leading the high pressing that the coach insisted on, Pedro was arguably the most important player he had. He is a system player, not an individual, one who breaks through the lines, a player as swift to defend as attack, making good decisions and moving the ball with speed.

His movement, in off the wing, is intelligent and his finishing crisp. He is calm, studies goalkeepers, and rarely hesitates. It is remarkable how often he is decisive. He may not be the most aesthetic footballer around but he has proven extraordinarily effective. Quick, clever, alert, when the chance dropped in Tbilisi it wasn’t a surprise that he reacted first, nor that he was there.

There is also a steel about him that has not always been apparent, behind the small, quiet, polite exterior, the words of praise for team-mates who have taken his place and the acceptance of managerial decisions. He describes them as “rivals” and he has resisted, competed. When he made his debut, he came on for Thierry Henry. Samuel Eto’o was in that team, too. Zlatan Ibrahimovic later arrived, then David Villa, then Alexis Sánchez. Then Neymar and Luis Suárez. Until recently, Pedro survived them all.

Pedro scored 22 in Ibrahimovic’s first and only season, helping Barça to win the league with his goal at the Bernabéu. The season after, he played alongside Messi and Villa in a team that was perhaps the purest expression of Guardiola’s philosophy – one of the many reasons why some feel a kind of nostalgia in his parting – and scored in the 5-0 win against Real Madrid and in the 2011 Champions League final against Manchester United at Wembley. The following season, his role was reduced but the season after that, with Neymar’s arrival looking like it would be the end, he was pivotal again, scoring 15 league goals. Not this time.

In February 2014, Pedro told the Guardian: “We have Alexis, Messi, Neymar. Another new signing, another big name, will probably arrive in the summer but I’ll keep going.” He added: “You know it’s always difficult to get minutes … [but] I’m happy with the opportunities I’ve had and the way I’ve taken them.”

He talked about football being a team game and staying positive, awaiting opportunities. But then he said a couple of things that stood out, underlining that he was not going to accept a cameo for ever: “And if not, then at the end of the season you analyse the situation and look for the best solution”.

He did not go then, but last season was a frustrating one. There were five goals in six games in the Copa del Rey, a competition whose early rounds are often populated by squad players. He scored six in the league, none in Europe. He wanted more opportunities but this time, getting them would be harder and there could be no real complaints. No one is truly arguing that Pedro should start often, not when you see who he is now competing with.

That is not to say that he won’t be missed. The club did not want him to go, although privately they consider £21m a good fee, and nor did they want to be seen to be pushing him out. Luis Enrique knows he would have been useful, but he wanted to be more useful. There was an inescapable footballing reality: there was not really a place for him, not a starting place anyway.

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Last week, the club’s president Josep Maria Bartomeu described Pedro as “fundamental”. The truth of course is that he is not. Ahead of him were arguably three of the best four players in the world, men who define a team that was once defined more by its midfielders. You don’t play ahead of Messi, Neymar and Suárez. It hurt Pedro to see that, even without Neymar, he was not chosen to start. Had he not been on the verge of going, he might have been, of course. But anyway he knew, and they knew, that once Neymar was back, Pedro would return to the bench.

That was where he was sitting there in Tbilisi, not expecting to get on. By his own admission he was “angry.” Yet then when they needed him Pedro was there, decisive once more. The 115th-minute winner felt like a metaphor for his Barcelona career. Not flash, not glamorous, not beautiful, but another goal and another trophy. “He was born for moments like that,” Javier Mascherano said. “Thanks Pedro,” ran one headline, summing it up. Another paper led on “A superhero named Pedro”.

At least Pedro leaves in the right way, a very Pedro sort of way. He had scored the winning goal in the 115th minute of the European Super Cup in 2009; now it happened again six years later. Between times, he has won it all. “He deserves it,” Andrés Iniesta said. Whether he felt part of it is a different matter; he looked like a man who had already departed. When the team collected the trophy, Pedro stood slightly apart, holding on to the balcony, gaze lost in the distance, as if seeking out a ship that has long dipped over the horizon.