He was already on £80k a week, so the 4/5 times as much was based on his expiring contract. Not on what we were offering him. It was reported that he wanted around £250k. Which as you mentioned was roughly the same as Araujo.
Konate has obviously negotiated a nice contract and signing on fee with Madrid, maybe if we offered him £250k early on he would have signed. But then again, maybe, this deal works better for the accounts.
Who knows, however, it seems we have pushed this transfer up the list of our priorities on the back of Gomez’s injury, an injury all of us fans are not surprised at. And in theory replaced a 1st team regular (who admittedly didn’t have the best of seasons) with a Player who has never played in England and comes with concerns.
All right, that’s a reasonable fee if the club decides to buy him. Because if they do, he’ll have played well enough to be considered a good addition to the squad.
The CB situation at Barca is that they have a lot of options, as @sgs pointed out, but Cubarsi is the only one who is a clear starter. Flick loves Eric Garcia, and will use him a lot, be it as a midfielder or a defender.
But crucially, he’s also very keen on having a left footed CB for build-up situations, which I think is a significant reason why he settled on Gerard Martin next to Cubarsi. They wanted Bastoni, but apparently decided he was too expensive; and as mentioned looked at Laporte as well, who also was too expensive.
Playing with Virgil might help to calm some of his excesses. I would argue that he’s a decent manipulator and passer of the ball from the right hand side, certainly much better in that respect than Ibou.
He´s not really like Konate and having brain farts and doing dumb things. It´s more rush of blood type so maybe Virgil would help with that yeah, good point.
