This summer, FC Barcelona were looking for an all-round striker. Needing a player capable of playing on the wing or at the forefront of the attack, the Catalan club explored numerous profiles. Ultimately, Marcus Rashford was signed on loan from Manchester United. A wise choice that paid off, as the former Mancunian has been satisfying since his arrival, with two goals and four assists in eight games. However, this summer, the Catalan club was looking for another player: Nico Williams . While Luis Diaz's name was also constantly being mentioned, the Spanish striker from Bilbao was the most concrete target for the Culés.
Ultimately, the deal, which seemed to be on track, fell through on its own. Indeed, without warning, Bilbao announced their player's contract extension. This was a real blow to the Catalan leadership, who were very confident about signing the Spanish international. Indeed, at the beginning of the summer, many Spanish media outlets even claimed that the player had assured his Barcelona teammates that he would join Barcelona during the summer transfer window. Since then, Barça's management has not returned to this painful episode. This is now a done deal with Deco, who decided to slam Bilbao, Nico Williams, and his agent this Tuesday during an interview with Mundo Deportivo.
"We weren't on Nico Williams," Deco claims.
Indeed, the sporting director of the Catalan club did not want to mince words and revealed all the behind-the-scenes details of this aborted transfer. " Nico didn't exactly have the profile we were looking for, but he can play on the left or the right ," explains Deco. " If a great player like Nico approaches us, when the agent looks for us, we discuss, and that's how it happens. Football is like that; the player, for one reason or another, didn't want the conditions that were offered to him. It's not a question of registration guarantees, it's very simple. If you want to negotiate, tell me everything you need and what you want and don't change anything afterward. That's it. And I won't talk about it anymore, there was too much discussion, too much nonsense, including from Bilbao." (…) There is no mistake, we simply set the club's conditions, then the negotiations have to be put on paper, in contracts, and we said that we did not accept the conditions they set because no player is going to condition us and, in the end, nothing happened. We gave them a deadline to respond, they did not respond, they went their way and we went ours.
After this frank explanation, the Catalan leader then launched into a rather childish speech in which he simply decided to castigate Bilbao's management. While recalling that the club was never looking for Nico Williams, but that it was the player and his agent who did everything to join Catalonia this summer: " I don't want to get into issues that don't concern me, I dedicate myself to the players, to the daily management of the club, but I don't think Bilbao is an example in this sense. We didn't look for their player, we didn't go looking for him. They should be concerned about the agent who came to Barça several times to offer the player. (...) I won't go into details, otherwise I would have to explain the negotiations that are going well or badly. And I don't like that. I have relationships with the agents and I must not expose them in public. Everyone wants to work for their own player, that's normal, and I won't go into details." I just want to make it clear that we didn't look for Nico, the agent looked for us. " That's it.
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