Nicolo Barella is an Italian professional soccer player, who plays as a midfielder for Serie A club Inter Milan and the Italian national team. Barella was born in Cagliari, the biggest city in the Sardinia region in Italy, on Feb. 7, 1997.

He made his debut in Serie A, the top league in Italy, with his hometown club, Cagliari, on May 4, 2015. After showing his amazing talent on various occasions with the Cagliari jersey, on July 12, 2019 Barella joined Inter Milan on a year-long loan deal with an obligation to buy with a four-year contract to take effect after the loan period. This was a huge step for Barella’s career, as by joining Inter Milan, one of the best clubs in Italy and Europe, everyone started noticing his amazing talent shown in amazing performances.

In the 2020-2021 season Barella won the Scudetto, the Italian league, with Inter, and also won the Euro 2020 with the Italian national team. Thanks to these amazing successes he won the award for the best midfielder in Serie A, the top Italian soccer league, and is among the 30 candidates to win the Ballon D’or 2021 alongside the best soccer players in the world, such as Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappe, Robert Lewandowski and Karim Benzema.

The Ballon D’or is the award for the best soccer player around the world and is the most prestigious award a player can win in his career. For instance, Lionel Messi has won it six times; he is the player who has won it the most times. Barella is almost irreplaceable for the Inter Milan head coach Simone Inzaghi and the Italian national team’s head coach Roberto Mancini. In the 2020-2021 season, he started for 36 out of the 38 games.

In this season he has started for every game and is the best assist man in the league having provided five assists and having scored one goal too. He is an underrated player and not a lot of people know about him. In Italy, he has received the right amount of fame he deserves, while in Europe and worldwide a lot of people still don’t know about him or don’t consider him as good as he is.

His intensity of play is amazing. He is everywhere on the pitch and still has a lot of energy to use even when the game is almost over. This allows him to play almost every game, rarely having to be substituted off to get some rest. Moreover, his dribbling skills are outstanding. He dribbles past the defense very quickly or sends a perfect through ball over the defense to find one of the strikers, leaving the opposition’s defense clueless of what just happened.

Barella is a basketball fan, and his idol is LeBron James. He wears the number 23 at Inter Milan because it’s Lebron’s jersey number at the Los Angeles Lakers and has named his dog Le Bron after the famous basketball player.

Nicolo Barella is certainly a player to look out for because he’s going to become one of the best and one of the most complete soccer players in Europe.

This article was written by Matteo Pozza, an exchange student from Italy, and a huge Inter Milan and Barella fan. His great-grandfather was Inter’s vice president.