Neymar to Barcelona is the huge transfer story waiting to happen this summer, with the Catalans looking to bring the Brazilian back to the club.
Yesterday we brought you a significant update on the situation, with RAC1 reporting Barça decided to pursue Neymar having discussed the potential transfer at a summit between the club’s board and the sporting staff.
No details were provided on the potential move, except that Barça were going to send a formal written offer to PSG sooner rather than later.
Sport update the story today and not only provide details on what happened at the meeting but the transfer Barcelona are proposing.
First, the newspaper explains that Barça president Josep Maria Bartomeu, Director of Football Javier Bordas, treasurer Enrique Tombas, CEO Òscar Grau, technical secretaries Eric Abidal and Ramon Planas and Brazilian advisor André Cury were all at the summit.
They concluded this was an excellent opportunity to bring Neymar back but agreed they could not afford to get the deal done this summer after already spending over €250m on new signings.
As a result, they will propose a loan deal to PSG that would see Neymar return to the Nou Camp on loan and it would include an option to buy him for €160m next summer. However, Sport explain it is not clear if this option to buy would be mandatory or not.
Whether it would be acceptable to PSG remains to be seen. They would presumably prefer for the deal to include a mandatory purchase price, particularly if Barcelona are not going to pay anything for the original loan.
However, the deal that took Kylian Mbappé to the Ligue 1 champions may provide the answer. That move saw PSG sign the French youngster on loan with a purchase option after a year that became mandatory so long as they didn’t get relegated.
That deal allowed them to dodge FFP restrictions and get the deal done, so perhaps a similar arrangement could be done to get Neymar’s transfer over the line as well.
