The current financial situation in football means most teams won’t have had a great transfer window, but it’s hard to think of many who’ve come out of this worse than Barcelona.
Losing Lionel Messi was a disaster when you consider it looked like it had all turned around and he would finally be staying, while they also took a monumental loss on Antoine Griezmann as he returns to Atletico Madrid with a reported option that will see Barcelona receive over £60m less than what they paid for him.
The embarrassment keeps coming as they’ve now officially confirmed that Miralem Pjanic will be going on loan to Besiktas, but the numbers don’t make for positive reading here either.
The Evening Standard reported that Barca paid a whopping €60m to take the then 30-year-old from Juventus, while he also arrived before Ronald Koeman did and it immediately became clear that he didn’t feature heavily in the Dutchman’s plans.
He only played in 19 La Liga games last year and you have to imagine that Barca are also having to supplement his salary to allow him to move to Turkey, while there’s no sign of that transfer fee being recouped either at this stage.
The transfer market has largely crashed and he’ll turn 32 this season so it’s hard to see him fetching a huge fee this summer, and it just compounds a miserable few years in the transfer market for Barca.