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Ryan Gauld, the boy wonder who earned the nickname ‘Scottish Messi’

NXGN traces the tortuous career that took him from Scotland, Portugal and Canada.

Vancouver is a long way from Scotland, and even further from Barcelona.

It is, however, in this Canadian city overlooking the Pacific that one can find the one who was once nicknamed the ‘Scottish Messi’. It’s about Ryan Gauld, a player capable of tearing apart MLS defenses. He’s been playing there for nearly two years now and, in that time, he’s displayed some of the qualities that have led him to be compared to the greatest player of all time.

These are comparisons made when he was still a kid. It was then that he shouldered all the responsibility of being the big star that an entire country had been waiting for so long. They dubbed him the ‘Scottish Messi‘ even though it was already clear to everyone that he would never live up to that label. And who could anyway? Perhaps it would have been better to speak of him as the next Kenny Dalglish or perhaps the next Denis Law, but this was not the case.

Gauld, in the end, he didn’t become the hero all of Scotland expected, or at least he hasn’t become one yet. After racking up one setback after another across Europe, he has apparently found far from home, the ideal place to express himself at his best.

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