Though Newcastle are fast becoming one of the teams to watch in the Premier League and in Europe, it’ll take them years to achieve the cachet that FC Barcelona have.
Ask most players who they’d love to represent and the chances are that most would plump for Real Madrid or Barcelona given half the chance.
The Spanish giants are slowly but surely finding their way back to the top table of domestic and European football, and that’ll surely be a relief to football lovers everywhere.
When the club were being hammered 8-2 in the Champions League by Bayern Munich, and things off the field looked as bleak as they ever have, there was a point when questions were genuinely being asked about Barcelona’s ability to continue as a business.
Fortunately, much of their troubles are now in the past and the Catalans are looking forward, signing high-quality players such as Joao Felix and Ilkay Gundogan in the process.
One other highly-rated ace might well be joining them in due course too, after Sport revealed that Newcastle’s Bruno Guimaraes has a secret clause written into his contract that would allow the player to leave for Barcelona for as little as €65/70m.
That’s significantly less than his €100m release clause, but is apparently that low for Barca only.
The Catalans aren’t out of the woods financially yet in any event, and they would have to sell before they could land the Brazilian, though it will encourage them to know of the clause’s existence.