The financial gap between the few elite sides in Europe and everyone else has grown to crazy levels in recent years, and it always means they can blow everyone else out of the water when it comes to signing players.
There is a flip side to that, and it makes it almost impossible to move players on if they don’t live up to the hype as nobody can ever come close to matching those salaries, and we often see players just wasting their careers sitting in the stands as they pick up over €10m a season for very little.
Barcelona are a prime example as they’ve thrown a lot of money around in recent years, and a report from Goal has highlighted how big the issue is.
They point to debt levels approaching €1billion so it’s clear that some players will need to leave, and Samuel Umtiti and Miralem Pjanic are two of the players who they want to move on.
They could both play at a high level but they don’t feature regularly for Barca, but a combined wage total of around €30m a season is making it almost impossible to attract any kind of interest.
It means they’ll need to take a big financial hit to just get them out the door and that could restrict them in the transfer market for years, so it will be interesting to see if anyone comes close to making an acceptable offer for either player this summer.
