Manchester City have been offered an ultimatum by Barcelona in their pursuit for defender Eric Garcia, according to reports.
What’s the word?
It is the worst kept secret right now around the blue half of Manchester regarding the Spaniard’s wish to leave the club. Some argued that he played like he didn’t want to be on the pitch against Leicester the other night.
After being heavily linked with a move to the Catalan giants, they have now come up with an alternate method that may tempt us into selling up.
Should City entertain Barcelona's offer?
Yes
No
Mundo Deportivo (via Sport Witness) revealed that Barcelona are not willing to pay more than our €12m for Garcia, which doesn’t come close to our €30m asking price for him.
They also say that they are confident of getting the player at some stage, One way of doing that is by offering their attacking midfielder Rafinha to move to the Etihad in the other direction, similar to what we’ve done with Nicolas Otamendi. The difference being that this would be a straight swap, with no transfer fee included.
No go for City
We cannot be lured into a false sense of security by clubs. Rafinha hasn’t played much football for Barcelona in the past 12 months, making just appearances before his loan move to Celta Vigo for the majority of the 2019/20 campaign. Even then, he only managed to score four goals and provide two assists from 30 games, as per TransferMarkt.
This is bad business if we decide to go ahead with this move, and I’m sure I will not be the only one saying this.
We already have plenty of attacking talent at the club. Rafinha simply has not been featuring enough at Barcelona, for my liking, and City should turn this proposal down on the spot.
Regardless of what people may think about the £8.55m-rated defender, he is a good young player and he will go on to do great things in the game. But at the same time, our club is a business and needs to be treated as such.
Careful considerations now need to be made about possibly bringing in another left-back, or maybe another centre half as well as Ruben Dias.