Opinion: Blues signing Spanish prospect shows incredible faith in Karanka for the future

Always looking towards the future.

It’s been something that the club has stressed for some time now, and it looks as if those moves are carrying on under the new regime.

Birmingham City announced yesterday that we have signed attacking midfielder Oriol Soldevila on a free transfer after he was let go from Barcelona at the end of last season. But don’t expect him to bring any of that La Masia magic to the first-team just yet, as the club revealed he will initially be joining the U23 side to begin with.

I’ll admit that I don’t know much, or indeed anything about him as a player, but if you’re invited to play in the Barcelona academy, you must have something about you.

However what I can say though, is that this is a great show of faith to Aitor Karanka that the board allowed him to make this move, because it shows that they intend to allow him to grow and develop him as a player, and that Karanka will be here throughout the tenure to oversee it. Hopefully so that he can use him further down the line with some of the other academy players, like he has shown faith in Adan George in the early stages of this campaign.

Just how quickly we’ll see him in the first-team, that’s really anybody’s guess. As last season showed with the form of Miguel Fernandez, just because you perform incredibly well at U23 level doesn’t mean that you are guaranteed a shot at promotion into the senior side, so unless he sets the world alight it could be some time before we see him.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

What about you? What do you make of this move?