Ex-Benfica target drank on Barcelona bench behind Guardiola | OneFootball

One of Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona “soldiers”, Aleksandr Hleb, for whom the Catalans paid around €20 million to Arsenal in the summer of 2008, was once just a step away from joining Benfica. Albert Dalmau, a former player at the Catalan club who shared a dressing room with the Belarusian, revealed a bizarre episode.

According to Dalmau, the curious incident took place during a summer tour in 2009, at a time when Hleb’s departure from the club was imminent. The Belarusian midfielder, aware that his days in Catalonia were coming to an end, decided to drink an alcoholic beverage on the substitutes’ bench during a match.

“He knew that in two or three days he was leaving and, in the Gatorade bottle [energy drink], there was Gatorade, but he also put alcohol in it,” Dalmau admitted while appearing on the ‘Montiliving’ podcast. In the summer of 2010, he came very close to becoming a Benfica signing - which sees two centre-backs on their way to the Luz - in the final days of that transfer window, but the negotiations eventually collapsed.

It should be remembered that, despite the high expectations surrounding his signing, the Belarusian’s performances never reached the expected level, and he ended up playing only a very limited role, especially after leaving the Spanish club.

Due to his poor performances, new loan spells followed, first at Birmingham and then at Wolfsburg.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇵🇹 here.