As they turned to acknowledge each other moments before kick-off inside a cavernous-sounding Ashton Gate, Han-Noah Massengo and Stefan Bajic may have allowed themselves a slight grin and momentary reflection on the unpredictable path of a football career.
Having developed through the France age groups and been highly-valued prospects at Monaco and Saint-Etienne, respectively, here were the two men lining up together again - the first time since an Under-19 fixture for Les Bleus against Denmark in November 2019 - but for Bristol City Under-21s against QPR.
Being a professional athlete is not a normal profession and therefore the route in which you travel can never be properly forecast. With the greatest of respect, it’s unlikely that either knew who City were until they were contacted by their agents over the prospect of a move.
Yet here they were in the Bristol sunshine, in front of a smattering of Robins fans, some leaving early to make the trip up to the Hawthorns to watch the senior side.
At 21 and 20, it shouldn’t be worthy of too much attention to see the two young men in the U21 set-up, except their situations at the club are very much at different ends of the scale: for Bajic, he’s just beginning his City career, building his match fitness before hopefully becoming part of the first-team; for Massengo, sadly, it increasingly looks like he’s coming towards the end of his.
It’s not unusual to see established senior players performing for Ali Hines’ unbeaten side, Kane Wilson, George Tanner and Timm Klose have all done it this season to maintain a level of match fitness and also so that Nigel Pearson can see they’re very much committed to the case.
Nahki Wells used it to excellent effect last season when on the periphery of the starting XI, as he not only showed Pearson his desire to win his place back but it also enabled him to develop a chemistry with Tommy Conway that has been carried through into this campaign with devastating effect.
It’d be nice to think of Massengo doing the same with Omar Taylor-Clarke, Ben Acey and Ewan Clark but, as it stands, by the time that talented trio move their way into the manager’s thinking, the Frenchman could well be long gone.
At the risk of going over old ground, the year-long anniversary of Massengo being offered a new contract around two months away but it remains unsigned and with each passing week the chances of pen being added to paper diminish.
That’s not to say that has any bearing as to why the 21-year-old was picked to play at Ashton Gate at Tuesday lunchtime, as opposed to the Hawthorns in the evening, because Massengo had something of a stinker in his most recent first-team appearance at Birmingham on October 8, and was then cast from the matchday 18 against Millwall.
As Pearson has maintained, while he doesn’t want players to run their contracts down, he will use the resources at his disposal, should they be appropriate to his needs until he’s no longer able to.
For Massengo to continue to be a first-team option up until the final game of the season on May 6, he needs to retain a sense of peak match fitness which cannot be done on the training ground. See the previous examples of Wilson, Tanner and Klose.
However, to widen the picture, and something that is also largely independent of being named in the U21s, is the fact, in essence, he’s now sixth choice in his chosen position, a situation that could even get worse for him as Ayman Benarous starts to edge towards a return by the end of the year.
Through need and desire, Pearson has changed his central midfield two quite considerably over the course of the campaign: in the Championship, Alex Scott has 11 starts in the position, also being asked to play at right-wing back and as an attacking 10; Joe Williams nine, as City retain an element of caution over his loading in a two-game week; Matty James six, impacted by his groin injury; Andy King one; while Dylan Kadji has been part of four matchday squads.
Whether or not you’d consider Kadji as being ahead of Massengo is for debate, but to put it in brutal terms - one represents the future of the club, whereas the more reduced his contract status gets, the more the latter is part of the past.
It didn’t seem so long ago that was Massengo was “the future”; before Scott, Benarous, Zak Vyner, Conway and even Antoine Semenyo, in terms of sustained first-team minutes, he was the loan youngster or academy product in the squad, outside of perhaps Max O’Leary or Jay Dasilva.
But it’s now hard to ignore the optics of Tuesday as he battled his way against QPR midfielders a few years his junior, hours before City delivered one of their best away performances of the season in front of a raucous travelling support in the Midlands, that City are slowly moving on from Massengo.
How he would have revelled in that atmosphere at the Hawthorns, celebrating in front of those fans as many of his best performances for City have been on the road: at Preston North End last season, most notably, but also Cardiff City, Stoke City and Fulham, helping him form his bond with the support, and trademark that song.
We all know he can be good enough, and that adjective alone is doing his talent a disservice; at his best a fireball of a midfielder who presses relentlessly, disrupts rhythm and then can break lines and feeds forward players at rapid speed.
Massengo’s “problem”, if you like, is that he’s always had a very high ceiling, but also a frustratingly low floor, in a position that requires the sort of Matty James-level mid-range consistency. To put it in simple terms, as a sitting or box-to–box midfielder, it’s sometimes better for the team and your own prospects in that framework to waver around 6-8/10 each week then swing wildly from four or five to 9/10.
That should be caveated by the fact that James is 31 and, no doubt, experienced such inconsistencies when he was 21 but Massengo’s other issue is of perception and the fact he’s been such a constant, and very visible presence in the squad, for so long that even though he’s still only 21, with 115 career appearances to his name - for reference, albeit impacted by injury but Williams, at 25, only beats him by 34 games - more is expected of him.
His football brain and body is, to some extent, at a more accelerated development, than his actual real-life brain, and that can lead to a strange contradiction, which leads us into his current contract situation.
There is a very binary notion that when players enter such moments in their careers with City that because they haven’t signed a deal it must mean, “they don’t want to be here anymore”. That is certainly true in some cases, whereby individuals literally no longer have a desire to represent the team nor longer want to live in the city. And, just for the record, sometimes that’s okay, you know. But, in Massengo’s case, it’s not that simple, as much as it would be nice to frame it that way, because it makes any debate around him so much more easy to conduct.
When he made the move to the West Country in 2019 it was for first-team football, his own self-development but also there was an element of a shop window decision. Shock horror! Some players want to play at the highest level, in this case the Premier League, and understand that to do it makes more of a career decision to be playing in the Championship than Monaco’s reserves.
The latter part of it hasn’t quite worked out, as the lack of activity from on high in the summer transfer window indicated, but the rest of it probably has: for better or for worse, he’s far more developed in his football career and self than he was when he arrived.
Some of that is natural. He signed when he was 18 and will be a few weeks shy of his 22nd birthday should he depart in 2023 - by simple genetics he’s going to be more mature, but he’s also now that more emotionally advanced and, due to his volume of professional minutes and working day-to-day at a club, wise to the requirements and demands of his chosen career. To propose an incredibly naff analogy, but we’ve thought of it, so we’ll roll with it, City have, to an extent, been his university education.
It won’t be of much concern to fans already willing to let him go, but his time here has been of enormous benefit to him. It may not seem so in the currency of the transfer market, but it will be as and when he has the time to reflect upon his career.
Whether that is reciprocated is the debate, I guess, because should it come to pass that Massengo makes a handful more appearances this season - at best - and then leaves for wherever is next for him, the argument could well be made that City have been better for the player, than the player has for City. Which isn’t a million miles away from university life, either, as it goes.
Contract years are strange times for any player, having been settled in a place and a club for a certain period of time, to not know where you’ll be living or who you’ll be working alongside next year is a bit of a weird concept. Massengo, like his peers, is experiencing that for the first time in his life.
Outside of the curated Instagram image and his status as a bit of a fan favourite for the younger generation, he is largely a quiet and thoughtful character; he’s certainly not a big extrovert of a personality when you see him in the routine confines of the HPC. One of the squad, yes, but never dominating conversation. You’d imagine this summer, this season and what is to come next, weighs heavy on his mind.
“Boo hoo, get on with it! Do you job!” you may cry, and that’s fair to an extent; these are paid professional footballers, and their jobs are to play football to the best of their ability, not play out self-doubt, angst and insecurities in public. But sometimes we do have to accept they are human beings who act just like me, you and everybody else.
For his part, Massengo remains committed to City - he wouldn’t have played for the U21s if he wasn’t, as a start. He also will also be appearing alongside Zak Vyner and Jay Dasilva at a Robins Foundation event this afternoon at a Bristol primary school for Black History Month. This may seem irrelevant, and perhaps you have no interest in such extra club-related activities, but an individual who “wants out” wouldn’t be doing that, if that was the case.
Instead, like most people his age, Massengo looks a little bit trapped in the middle and at a crossroads, not just with his City career but also life. His next contract will likely be for 3-4 years and take him into his mid-20s, a significant period in anyone’s existence, the question has to be for him: does he want that to be in Bristol or somewhere else?
Certainly, it increasingly looks unlikely that will be here, but we also shouldn’t discount it completely, because he’s entitled to see what offers are out there and what else is available. It may not be so easy for fans to swallow, but is there really anything wrong with a player assessing his options before making such a seismic life choice?
It could well come to pass, and as January approaches he’ll have a much better idea, that for the destinations that may be available to him next summer and beyond, staying at Ashton Gate does make the most sense for him, professionally and personally. He’s not alone in that sort of thought process, either.
As much as we’ve formed our ideas of what Massengo is as a player, we have only really scratched the surface and few, at 21, are really the true concept of what they’re set to become. There remain many raw edges and issues, but will be an eternal shame to see him depart for measly compensation, when City have played such a formative role in his development.
The situation is such that nothing is likely to change between now and the second half of the season, it’s just how Pearson manages it and how Massengo reacts to that management with hopefully, at bare minimum, a suitably clean conclusion for the betterment of City’s season.
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