MEXICO CITY -- Jonathan dos Santos has come a long way since his professional debut with FC Barcelona on Oct. 28th, 2009. He began with Barca's youth program in 2002, and while playing for Barca B alongside the likes of Sergi Roberto and Rafinha, he was even the team captain. His struggle to find playing time in Barcelona's first-team lasted until 2014, when he decided to leave the Blaugrana and head to Villarreal. But all those years that he spent in Barcelona, observing and modeling his game after midfielders like Andres Iniesta, Sergio Busquets and Xavi Hernandez, shaped him into the player he has become. He wears Mexico's No. 6 with pride, and in the Juan Carlos Osorio era he's become a midfielder capable of single handedly providing balance to the team.
"Villarreal has given me what I didn't have in my last years at Barcelona, which are those minutes that every player needs. Over here [Villarreal] I got them. I'm important for the club, and I've grown as a player," Jonathan said in a press conference back in early May.
The key for "Jona" at Villarreal is that he has been able to put into practice all the skills that La Masia gave him. Back in 2010, Marti Perarnau -- author of Pep Confidential: Inside Pep Guardiola's First Season at Bayern Munich and other Barça focused books -- wrote an opinion piece published in Sport (Barcelona's sports newspaper) on Jona's growth at the club. Perarnau titled the opinion piece, "Jonathan dos Santos: Growing in the Shadow."
In it, he described the youngest of the Dos Santos brothers as a builder of plays: "Jona is always a calm player, play builder, wise, and the thermometer of the team.
"He has the panoramic vision of the Blaugrana commandments: comes down to receive, asks for the ball, and moves the team over and over again."
With Osorio's Mexico, Jona has more liberty to move through the middle. His natural habitat is at the heart of the field, where he is primarily responsible for maintaining possession of the ball. It's surprising that in the three seasons he's played with the Yellow Submarine, he's taken the field as a right midfielder -- almost like a right winger. But under head coach Fran Escriba, he's been given the green light several times to move to the center and become the thermometer of the team, just as Perarnau once described him.
Dos Santos just completed his best professional season while playing a total of 3,078 minutes, the most he has tallied in his career. With Jona playing all 90 minutes, Villarreal defeated Atletico Madrid twice this past season. Over the course of the season, he scored three goals and recorded five assists.
Everything seems to be falling into place for Jona. After picking up an assist in Mexico's 3-0 win over Honduras, he shared his happiness with Fox Deportes: "I'm here to contribute and to always help the team. The team is doing a great job and we have to continue on the same page...I've been waiting a long time for this moment with the national team, showing little by little [that I can be an important player]. We have to continue working with the same humility."
Reaching this point has been a rather rocky journey for dos Santos, who in 2010 was on the verge of participating in the World Cup for El Tri but was removed from the roster before the team took off for South Africa. A year later, he was suspended from the national team for six months after being implicated in a prostitution scandal that involved eight members of the U-23 national team, which was training in Ecuador at the time.
Dos Santos has grown from these two incidents, and since then he's worked his tail off to become one of El Tri's fundamental players. Certainly, arriving at Villarreal and winning a starting role at a club that's always competing for a spot among La Liga's top six teams has influenced him. At 27 years old, his maturity will be important as Mexico prepares to face Portugal in the Confederations Cup.
The contributions that Jona and Carlos Vela have brought to the national team are noticeable. Now, as Rafael Marquez, Miguel Layun and Andres Guardado return to the fold, it will be interesting to see if Jona can make space for himself in El Tri's starting XI. Up until now, Jona has given every indication that he can serve as Mexico's thermometer on the field, but ultimately that decision rests upon Osorio.