Barcelona has revealed just exactly how much manager Ernesto Valverde will be given for summer acquisitions.

The Brazilian made the Summer transfer window his own personal soap opera, which dragged on for what seemed like weeks before he finally handed over a check for €222 million to Barcelona, despite reports of the La Liga ready to block the move. But everything went through and Neymar became the most expensive player in football history, annihilating the comparatively paltry sum of 90 million that Manchester United shelled out for Paul Pogba.

Thanks to that, Barcelona got a massive influx of money and went on to spend that massive influx, bring in the likes of Philippe Coutinho for a £142 million, Ousmane Dembele for £95 million, Paulinho for £36 million and Nelson Semedo for £27 million among other players. All in all for a grand total of a £290 million, most of that offset thanks to Neymar’s astronomical transfer fee.

However, this will have a massive impact on the club’s summer spending and Barcelona Vice-president Jordi Mestra has confirmed as much in an interview with Sport Spain. The 47-year-old went on to say, “Each season we have the same amount: 60 million euros plus sales. This board, since 2010, has given more than 180 million euros of benefits. Nobody can throw us in face that we do not look at the account of results. 

We have always raised the level of income. We are a very rigorous meeting economically speaking. The wage bill is high, yes, because having the players we have is not cheap. Our priority is sports excellence and economic rigor. One endures the other. They are very linked.”

Meanwhile, the war between both Mestra and Neymar continues on as the Barcelona vice-president going on to claim that Neymar’s dishonesty has been the sole reasons for the surge in transfer fees over the last few months. “What hurt me the most was the way it happened,” he told Sport. “We were all on tour talking with him and his father, and they were not transparent.

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If he came to us and said, I want to go, like Cesc [Fabregas], Pedro [Rodriguez], Alexis [Sanchez] and [Javier] Mascherano, we would have reached an agreement. What you can’t do is rock the boat. He played cat and mouse with us. He told us nothing.

If he had done, PSG would have been able to buy him for less money and it would have cost us less to sign [replacements], too. What Neymar’s behaviour created was the market inflation. We would have saved a lot of money and a lot of media noise.”

Author’s take:

Despite Jordi Mestra saying that the club will have only 60 million euros to spend, Barcelona still has a few players that they can and want to offload, which should give them well over a £100 million to spend on reinforcements during the summer. However, it also depends on the kind of players that the club wants to bring in.

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