When Real Madrid and Barça recruit for non-sporting reasons

Quite often, behind the arrival of a player, there may be certain somewhat obscure motivations. Doing a favor to a friend’s agent by recruiting his foal is a relatively common practice, especially in clubs in the middle or bottom of the table. Among the big teams, we know that we look a lot at the marketing side, and that some popular players can also generate additional sources of income in addition to the simple sporting aspect, via the sale of derivative products or certain commercial agreements. On the side of Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, ​​this second practice is very frequent. Florentino Pérez’s famous galactic recruitment policy in the early 2000s was based heavily on it, with David Beckham as the best example, while in Catalonia it was known that certain recruits like Neymar, who of course had above all a sporting logic, would also pay off big off the field.

But over the last decade, the two ogres of Spanish football have sometimes carried out a few operations that went beyond sport and classic marketing aimed at selling a lot of shirts in X countries or on X continent. On the Real Madrid side, for example, the arrival of James Rodriguez, brilliant at the 2014 World Cup, enabled ACS, Florentino Pérez’s group, to land a construction site and its operation in an operation estimated at 820 million euros in Colombia. . A big blow for the multinational headed by the president of Real Madrid, accustomed to such blows, since the American tours of the reigning European champion also coincided with several contracts signed by ACS in California. Same case for Keylor Navas and Costa Rica. Thus, Real Madrid does not hesitate to recruit players from a country to facilitate relations and contact with the government authorities of the nation in question. Pérez can then set up his activities there more easily.

To read
Barca will listen to offers for Eric Garcia

Brazil, Barça’s hunting ground

Less disturbing and funnier, the arrival of Edwin Congo in Madrid in 1999 from Once Caldas. During a Libertadores match against River Plate, the young Colombian striker destroyed the Argentinian club, with a double in the key. What did not escape a young supporter of Real Madrid, who wrote a letter to the merengue management to praise the qualities of the player and convince them to recruit him. And the player arrived well in Madrid, even if he was a huge flop behind. The arrival of Take Kubo in 2019 also responded to obvious financial interests in Japan, where the people of Madrid know that there is a lot of commercial potential to be exploited. His compatriot Pipi, 19 and still a youngster at Real Madrid, recently signed a colossal contract with Rakuten Sports, a huge agency that will manage his marketing and advertising rights in his home country. Which will, logically, have positive repercussions for the club in the Spanish capital.

On the side of Barcelona, ​​there is a package of somewhat troubled operations. We think of this famous Pjanic-Arthur exchange with Juventus in 2020, which was actually not really one. The Catalans would have paid 60 million euros for the former OL, while the Turinese would have put 72 million euros on the table for the Brazilian. An operation which mainly served to disguise the financial balance sheets of the two teams, and which is in the sights of the justice of the transalpine country. What happened around Paulinho, who arrived in 2017 from Guangzhou Evergrande, also questioned many people on the other side of the Pyrenees. The Brazilian midfielder, recruited for 40 million euros, returned to his original club a year later, against 42 million euros. What to ask questions…

We rinse friends!

It must be said that Barça and Brazil is a beautiful love story. In the field, with Neymar, Ronaldinho, Rivaldo or Romario, but not only. In January 2020, Barca signed an unknown named Matheus Fernandes for 7 million euros. The midfielder will never have played in Barcelona and had been loaned to Valladolid upon his arrival, playing only 3 games in La Liga… before leaving for free at Palmeiras in 2021. A simple recruitment error, some will say, but the close ties between Barça and Palmeiras in the past and the presence of André Cury, unofficial adviser to the club, in the operation, do not really encourage giving the benefit of the doubt to Barça. In the past, the Traffic agency for which Cury worked had notably succeeded in placing many of its Palmeiras players, such as Keirrison (14 M€) or Henrique (10 M€), within the Catalan club, and all of them flopped . Very strange transfers, but not the only ones, since afterwards, Barça will again recruit Danilo, another resounding flop who belonged to Traffic but evolved in São Paulo, or the Colombian defender Yerry Mina, who evolved well in Palmeiras and had cost 12 million euros in Barcelona. Players like Gabriel Novaes or Robert Gonçalves had also arrived in Barça’s B team before leaving Catalonia without pain or glory.

The recurrence of certain proper names – Palmeiras, Cury, Bartomeu/Rosell, Traffic – in all its operations logically leaves very little doubt that there were interests going beyond the sporting framework, especially since None of these players have shown they have the level to even be a substitute at Barcelona. In an article published in 2020, we notably make the connection between all these parts: “Sandro Rosell, predecessor of Josep Maria Bartomeu at the head of the Ciudad Condal club and former employee of Nike, had also been at the origin of a contract signed between the American equipment manufacturer and the Brazilian selection in the 90s and on which Traffic had hit a huge jackpot. A deal on which the American justice then investigated in depth. The Catalan leader then went to prison following a case where we still find two common denominators, Traffic and Brazil. These were bribes and money laundering (20 million euros) in the context of obtaining image rights for the matches of the Brazilian selection..

Cury puts Barça in the sauce

Cury’s double hat is also a concern for Barça, since if he had participated in the arrival of Neymar in 2013… he also participated and received commissions on his departure to Paris four years later. We also know that some deals were made thanks to and because of him. In 2018, Emerson was offered to FC Barcelona, ​​​​unconvinced at the time. The side today at Tottenham then changed agents, enlisting André Cury. Six months later, he was made official as a new Barça player. André Cury is also behind the arrival of Igor Gomes for the FC Barcelona U19 team, in suspicious circumstances to say the least. The Catalans settled, in 2019, the player’s €300,000 training allowance at Cohimbra Sporte. Except that the player played for Volta Redonda, a modest club in Rio de Janeiro. An exchange of licenses would have been carried out just before his departure for Barcelona, ​​where nobody knew the player when he landed at Le Prat airport. The player returned to Brazil last summer in total indifference.

It is not only in Brazil that Barça has made a few grubs. In January 2019, FC Barcelona announced that it had recruited Frenkie de Jong, one of the most highly rated players of the time. The Catalans had beaten PSG and several big European clubs in this case. Barely a few months later, the B team of the La Liga club announced the arrival of a certain Mike van Beijnen, a 20-year-old right-back from NAC Breda. An operation that would have gone unnoticed if Van Beijnen was not the son of Ali Dursun… Frenkie de Jong’s agent. A way to thank him for bringing his client to Barcelona. Unsurprisingly, the player did not have the level and did not last long in Catalonia, leaving the club after six months, without having played a single minute with Barça B in the Spanish third division. And there is no doubt that on the side of Barça like Real Madrid, and like in the majority of clubs in the world, there are plenty of operations where we could also find some gray areas by digging a little…