The loan of Clément Lenglet to Aston Villa and Ansu Fati to Brighton are Barcelona’s first official moves on the last day of the transfer market. There is no purchase option in both cases. If nothing changes, Lenglet, who has a contract with Barcelona until 2026 and who is not in Xavi’s plans, will have to renegotiate his future next summer while Ansu Fati leaves to gain confidence, minutes and return to the club of his reinforced life.
In the case of Lenglet, Aston Villa assumes a small part of his record, which this year is 16 million euros, since the Frenchman begins to receive the deferred amount in 2020 when, like Piqué, De Jong and Ter Stegen, he negotiated the extension of his contract adjusting his salary due to the pandemic. This is the second loan for Lenglet who last year played for Tottenham.
Different is the transfer of Ansu Fati. The club trained by Roberto Zerbi, a key figure in Ansu’s decision, assumes 80% of his record. The player, who went to Seville to consider his future, communicated his decision to Xavi on Wednesday, traveled to London from Seville yesterday and no longer trained with his teammates.
There will be more moves. Abde, the Moroccan winger, could be transferred to Betis with whom he is negotiating in the last few hours. At first Xavi refused to let him leave. He considers that, like Eric Garcia, who has a transfer proposal from Girona, they are necessary footballers to complete an already short squad. But everything is ready for him to go to the Betic club where Ramon Planes awaits him, the sports director who brought him to Barça when he was at Hércules and with whom he maintains a very good relationship.
However, from the environment of Abde, they affirm that in the last hours Betis and Osasuna have applied to buy the player and now the departure of the Moroccan winger in the form of a transfer is a possibility because it would help to expand the scarce financial margin of the club .
For months the entity has been looking for income to try to improve its numbers and for LaLiga to allow them to register players. Despite reaching an agreement for Barça Vision with the German fund Libero for 120 million euros, the 40 million that were to be paid this week have not yet arrived. An essential amount to face the remaining operations.
Having seen what has been seen and with the hope that the money arrives soon, Laporta will make a move today. He will present a personal guarantee together with the treasurer Ferran Olivé of 20 million to, in addition, manage to register Iñaki Peña, Iñigo Martínez and also Gavi. The latter is already listed as a first-team player but by court order and in a precautionary manner.
The remainder of the guarantee, always pending the lever, will go to João Cancelo, the Manchester City right-back who has been waiting in Portugal for a week for his one-year loan without a purchase option to close. In Manchester they hope that today Barcelona, ??which was going to assume the entire token, will renegotiate this last condition. Cancelo is also willing to lower his record.
And Joao Felix? The Portuguese, blessed by the board and not so much by Xavi, is willing to lower his salary to dress as a blaugrana also on loan. Today he has no longer trained with Atlético de Madrid. Everything is open.
