Two years ago I sat in the bowels of the Stade de France in Paris and watched as Samuel Eto’o bounced his young son on his knee and faced the media. He had just helped Barcelona to lift the European Cup and he looked a picture of confidence and success.

And with good reason. That season Eto’o had scored 33 goals in 45 La Liga and Champions League appearances. He probably would have scored more if he had not taken a month off to play for Cameroon in the African Cup of Nations (in which he scored five goals in four matches). Ronaldinho may have been the eye candy for Barcelona that season, but it was Eto’o who kept the blaugrana (the blue and reds) running on time, thanks to his goalscoring and his selfless, dynamic movement, which often allowed teammates a breather when the opposition had the ball.

Now Eto’o is dangerously close to being persona non grata at the Nou Camp. He was on a three-man list of players whom the club wanted to offload this summer. Deco and Ronaldinho - the other two on the list - are gone, Eto’o is still around, although that could change.

Talk about going out of fashion overnight. Barcelona are treating him like an old pair of acid-washed jeans. Except, unlike unwanted apparel, they have to pay him £100,000 a week for the next two seasons.

So, the question is, how do you fall so far so fast? Eto’o is 27 and it is an open secret that Barcelona would have sold him for about the £20.3 million that Liverpool paid Tottenham Hotspur for Robbie Keane (who is a year older and is not in the same league as Eto’o). Yet there has been no serious interest, assuming you discount the stories linking him with Kuruvchi, the champions of Uzbekistan.

His critics point to the knee injuries that have slowed him down over the past two seasons, the same injuries that have prompted Josep Guardiola, the fledgeling Barcelona coach, to bank on Lionel Messi and Bojan Krkic. There are even rumours that successive operations and a decade of wear and tear have left Eto’o with so little cartilage in his knees that he will never be the same player again.

This may be true or a malicious rumour. What is indisputable is that, after being cleared to return to action in early December last year, Eto’o scored 16 goals in 17 league appearances (all of them from open play), and five in the African Cup of Nations. If that is what a man with bad knees can do, for the good of goal-keepers everywhere one can only hope that he never returns to full strength. After all, those 16 league goals (in half a season) are more than Didier Drogba, Wayne Rooney, Carlos Tévez, Francesco Totti, Miroslav Klose, Dimitar Berbatov or Thierry Henry managed in all of last season.

Sure, Eto’o was not the irresistible force he had been in 2005-06, but those numbers must mean something. Barcelona have said that Eto’o “might well stay” and Guardiola says that he can fight for a place in the team, which is also a way of saying: “Nobody wants him, so we’re stuck with him. Might as well see if he can still perform.”

Eto’o seems to be in a difficult situation. His age and performances make him a superstar and, as such, he is more than a footballer, he is a little corporation with a constellation of commercial interests around him, which is why, were he to leave the Nou Camp, he could move only to another big club. But there is a finite number of big clubs. Liverpool have opted for Keane, Chelsea are banking on Drogba, Real Madrid are not an option, Inter Milan and Juventus have a glut of strikers, AC Milan have put their eggs in Ronaldinho’s basket, Arsenal are loath to spend big on older players and Manchester United have not shown any interest.

So Eto’o has no choice but to work his rear end off to impress Guardiola and carve out a role at Barcelona. For someone with his track record, it is an unfamiliar position. It is not an issue of feeling sorry for him: the £10 million he will make over the next two years will soften any blow to his pride. The question is why he appears to have been written off at the age of 27.

And another thing...

Lyons finally face a fight

The French league kicked off at the weekend with Lyons going for their eighth consecutive title. Having jettisoned Alain Perrin, Lyons are coached by Claude Puel, the former Lille coach, and it looks as if they will face a genuine challenge this year. Free-spending Marseilles have added Bakary Koné, from Nice, and Hatem Ben Arfa, from Lyons no less, to their front line, while Bordeaux, brilliantly marshalled by Laurent Blanc last season to take the title race to the final game of the season, have picked up Yoan Gouffran, the tricky winger from Caen, and Yoann Gourcuff, the former AC Milan midfield player. Stay tuned.

Rogge’s idea rings hollow

Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, is right to demand that clubs release under-23 players for the Olympic football tournament, in accordance with the regulations. But he is wrong to suggest that the Olympics should become part of the official Fifa calendar, which would mean that, as with the World Cup, the Olympic Games would be held on “international dates”, effectively meaning that no top-flight club football could be played on those days. The Olympic tournament simply is not big enough – in terms of interest and the number of players involved – to warrant such a move.