When Italian football fans saw him with the Danish national team at the World Cup in Mexico, they could hardly believe this was the same player they saw struggle weekend after weekend in the Serie A.. It looks as though the extremely defensive football played in Italy in the 80s simply wasn`t his cup of tea, and so Laudrup failed in being an adequate successor to Platini after the latter had called it a day in 1987. In the same year, the Juventus board made a failed attempt on trading him to Liverpool in exchange for Ian Rush. Two years later, he was signed by Barcelona where it took him another year to acclimatize. In the World Cup summer of 1990, Bulgarian striker Hristo Stoichkov was signed from CSKA Sofia whose arrival marked the beginning of the "Dream Team". Barca won the Championship in the 1990/91 season with a kind of football the world had not seen since the great days of Ajax in the early seventies. When they conquered the Champions League in the London final against Italian Champions Sampdoria, both Laudrup and Stoichkov were counted amongst the world`s greatest offensive players - and that`s what they were.
