Imagine, for a moment, that everything goes perfectly from FC Barcelona’s point of view. Imagine that in a year, the sale agreement of Arthur Melo to Juventus for 72 million euros (with additional 10 million euros in potential add-ons) and the signing of Miralem Pjanic from Juventus for 60 million euros (plus 5 million euros in possible add-ons) it will work so well that those taxes, or better yet one of them, no longer seem so inflated. Hell, imagine it’s getting a bit of a bargain. Yes, even when taking into account the increase in wages. Imagine that everything starts to sound like a stroke of genius.
– Transfer news: Arthur joins Juventus, Pjanic in Barcelona
Imagine that Pjanic is exactly the player that Barcelona needs; imagine winning the league and the Champions League with their new signature. Imagine marking the winner if you want. (Also a brilliant target.) Imagine that Arthur does nothing for Juve at the same time. Not next year or any year for the next decade, long after Pjanic retired. Imagine he’s barely playing; imagine looking at him, injured and not committed – and not making mistakes, some at Camp Nou would love him – and thinking about how smart he seems to have got rid of it, the fault is all his.
Imagine all this and this deal is still a defeat. As good as it may be, this does not stop being another expression of failure, still symbolic of a system malfunction. It is not so much the departure of Arthur itself that saddens some fans, and certainly it is not the arrival of Pjanic; that’s what it all means. What it reveals, again. Imagine this ends up being the right move – and it could – is still for the wrong reasons.
Since joining Barcelona in 2018, Arthur has started less than 50% of their games. He was very injured. He was also charged quite a bit, with news of releases filtered to the local media at the right times. (Expect him to accelerate now as the club tries to justify the sale of apparently ruined goods.) Whenever Arthur played, his performance at Wembley (leading Barcelona to a 4-2 victory over Tottenham in the Champions League, phase a groups, back in 2018) has never been repeated. Neither were Xavi’s performances repeated and, after all, that’s how it got there. But the “Nuovo Xavi” provided only four goals and six assists. In Seville last week, he has always come back, a metaphor for the past few months.
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But that’s not why he leaves, even if it helps. For all those problems, for all the flaws, a survey on Sport showed that 77% said it was
Arthur’s departure doesn’t have much to do with football as with finance, which helps explain an apparently strange deal in which Barcelona and Juventus swapped players, with an extra € 10 million paid on top by Juventus. 70 million euros said it was worth the effort. But there are no 70 million euros to pay anywhere except on the spreadsheet.
The rating of the two players seems high in a post-pandemic market, and these are not deals that would have been done without one another. Nor are those taxes, which exist in isolation; Pjanic “is” only € 60 million because Arthur is worth “70 million euros” and vice versa. By setting the price there, as high as possible, both clubs found a solution. Not on the pitch, but outside of it. And in the short term, especially in the case of Barcelona.
Don’t worry about the players for a moment: this is an agreement that brings Juventus and Barcelona closer together to be able to make a profit before the end of the financial year, which is at the end of this month. The incoming “money” – and it is worth repeating that the only money on the move is € 10 million – is immediate income in full. The outgoing cost is distributed over the duration of their contracts through amortization. Hey, soon, close to a profit of € 50 million. It is useful when it comes to FFP. Accounting is more creative than midfielders.
For Barcelona, this is particularly important. More precisely, for the Barcelona council it is. Sam Marsden and Moi Llorens explained in these pages how Barcelona already needed to collect 124 million euros in sales this season, which enabled them to find around 60 million euros before July 1st . And this was before the effects of the pandemic were calculated. Otherwise, the board of directors would be personally responsible for 15% of the loss, as required by the 1990 law governing club facilities. what this is why Barcelona was so desperate to get an agreement, because an apparently strange exchange agreement happened.
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Sid Lowe thinks Lionel Messi may be problematic for Barcelona because they depend too much on him.
That Barcelona was in that position was quite worrying. The way they got there, and what it means, is profoundly significant and most deeply worrying, even allowing for the unexpected blow of the coronavirus pandemic for which they are obviously blameless. It’s what it says about their ability to form a team and build a team, what it says about the structure, about the whole institution. Is that another succession is interrupted, another transfer has been broken, another plane in pieces. The image is larger than Pjanic.
In 2014, Luis Suárez, Ivan Rakitic and Marc-Andre ter Stegen signed. That was the last market managed by Andoni Zubizarreta as sporting director before being fired. They hit the highs the following summer, which is the best thing that could happen to a club, but in the long run it may not have been a good thing for Barcelona. Since then they have signed: Arda Turan, Aleix Vidal, Andre Gomes, Paco Alcácer, Samuel Umtiti, Lucas Digne, Jasper Cillessen, Denis Suárez, Marlon, Yerry Mina, Gerard Deulofeu, Nelson Semedo, Paulinho, Ousmane Dembele, Philippe Coutinho, Jean- Clair Todibo, Kevin-Prince Boateng, Jeison Murillo, Arturo Vidal, Arthur, Clement Lenglet, Malcom, Antoine Griezmann, Frenkie De Jong, Neto, Junior Firpo, Emerson and Martin Braithwaite.
Those are the ones who came – their search for strikers this summer ended up being embarrassing – and half of them are gone. It is too early to judge De Jong. Dembele may be fine as he heads for hers
There was bad luck, and a lot; guilt does not need to be sought for everything. And some of those signatures were always meant to be only short-term solutions. Beautiful. But this is a billion euros of players, and how many of them can be considered an unqualified success? Seriously. None? The money they got for Neymar, which they spent right away, desperate to make amends and start a spiral in which they’ve been stuck ever since, all went and for what? So that they can try to get it back but don’t have the money to do it?
Neymar was the player who should have guaranteed Barcelona’s future, playing alongside Messi and then taking over from him. It made sense. But they were unable to stop him from leaving – and unable or unwilling to report back when they realized that all those other plans were not working, even though he was desperate to return. They failed to buy it, but it still cost them. Much of that money had long been spent on Coutinho. The man they suggested might be the new Iniesta, but who went away and came back again and who is desperate to free himself once again – and this time forever.
For now, however, Arthur has gone, above all because among the many players that Barcelona has tried to put pressure, it was he who convinced to leave. Even if things unfold perfectly from here, even if Pjanic is brilliant and Arthur is not, this is a failure. It’s not just that they sold the Brazilian, but they sold a player who was a strategic signature, which made sense to a player whose arrival seemed to be a sign that they were reconnecting with their identity and essence.
They had looked for the right signature not only for the name that attracted their attention, whoever was available. They were planning for their future, but were unable to avoid losing their religion.
People will laugh at the “New Xavi” thing now – and it was always likely to be a millstone, a title to be handled with care and best avoided – but it wasn’t just the media that made this claim, something to be blamed on strangers. It was the club. Sports director Robert Fernández said it explicitly. He is no longer the sports director. Messi also compared him to Xavi. Oh, and Xavi himself said Arthur had “Barcelona DNA”.
Today he is a Juventus player.
“Money should be on the field, not in the bank,” said Johan Cruyff, but Barcelona needed it on the books and quickly. It wasn’t Xavi, critics will say, and they’ll be right. But even Xavi wasn’t Xavi until he was 28 years old. Arthur is 23 years old and should have been in the club for years, but in the week Lionel Messi turned 33, he’s gone, reduced to a number on the balance sheet.
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