It’s starting to become clear that big clubs are going to start using their fringe players as collateral when trying to make new signings, but that may not be straight forward.
In an ideal world the selling club will be interested in the exchange and it could help to lower an asking price, but that might be wishful thinking.
It’s important to remember that the players may not want to leave, while simply offering a fringe player that nobody wants is unlikely to go down that well.
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With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that Sport have indicated Barcelona want to offer two youngsters to Bayer Leverkusen in an attempt to sign Kai Havertz.
The two players in question are Marc Cucurella and Carles Alena, although the report does acknowledge that they would only help to lower the €100m asking price, so some money will need to be offered too.
Cucurella and Alena are both out on loan so it’s not clear if their current clubs have buy out options which would only confuse this, while Man United, Chelsea, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich are credited with an interest by the report too.
At this point it just seems to be paper talk with no real indication that the deal will go through, but it looks likely that more exchange rumours will keep coming.