Karim Adeyemi Barcelona was always going to be a slow-burn signing. Six weeks in, the German winger has two goals, one backflip and a throwaway line in the mixed zone that tells you rather a lot about why Hansi Flick keeps picking him.
Adeyemi opened his Spotify Camp Nou account on Wednesday night in the 5-1 demolition of Feyenoord that launched Barca’s Champions League campaign. It was not a tap-in.
The goal: a diagonal, a swing of the wrong foot
The clock read 22 minutes when Joao Cancelo found him near the left touchline. Adeyemi took the ball inside on a diagonal and, as Mundo Deportivo noted, nobody went with him — Andreas Christensen had pushed high enough to pin the Feyenoord full-back Read, leaving a corridor through the middle of the pitch that simply stayed open.
From the edge of the box the 24-year-old bent a shot with his right foot back across goalkeeper Ernst and into the far side of the net, close to the angle. 2-0, and the tie was effectively finished before the half hour.
Then came the celebration. Adeyemi sprinted towards the corner flag, stopped, and threw a standing backflip — his signature since his Dortmund days — to a stadium that had not seen it before.
‘I don’t have a weak foot’
The detail that stuck afterwards was which foot he used. Adeyemi is left-footed. Both of the goals he has scored since joining Barca — the first in the opening-weekend win at Elche, this one against Feyenoord — were struck with his right.
Asked about it in the mixed zone, he grinned and said simply: “I don’t have a weak foot.”
Delivered with a smile, and half a joke, but the numbers back him up. Across four years at Borussia Dortmund, Adeyemi scored 36 goals: 22 with the left, 12 with the right and two headers, per Mundo Deportivo. Plenty of those right-footed finishes arrived on the counter, in moments when there was no time to shift the ball onto his stronger side and he hit it anyway. In his first season in a senior top flight, with RB Salzburg, he actually scored more with his right than his left.
He is not genuinely two-footed. He is something more useful for a Flick winger: comfortable enough on the other side that defenders cannot simply show him one way.
What it means for Flick’s left wing
Adeyemi started against Feyenoord in place of Anthony Gordon, the summer’s most expensive arrival, and was withdrawn for the Englishman on 63 minutes — just over an hour of football, and the point comfortably made.
That is the shape of Barca’s left flank now. Flick has spent the summer building a forward line with more bodies and more flexibility in it, and Adeyemi — able to play either wing, and even through the middle as a nine — has settled on the left, where the competition is as fierce for him as it is for Gordon. Neither is guaranteed anything, which is roughly the point of signing both.
Wednesday belonged to Raphinha, who tore the game open early, and there were goals for Lamine Yamal and Gabriel Jesus to finish it off. But five games into the season Barca have scored 22 times, and the €22m winger who was supposed to need a settling-in period has already contributed twice — with the foot he isn’t supposed to use.
