Martin Braithwaite to Barcelona makes mockery of rules as Leganes pay the price for Catalans' poor planning
Emergency at Camp Nou. Barcelona, second in LaLiga, lose one of their forwards to injury for the rest of the season, but are allowed to sign a new player outside the transfer window.
Emergency at Butarque. Leganes, second to bottom of LaLiga, lose one of their players because Barca pay his release clause, but are not permitted to recruit a replacement.
The Catalan club have agreed to pay €18 million for Danish international Martin Braithwaite, a player who will not be eligible to feature in the Champions League and has been brought in, essentially, for 14 league games.
Braithwaite has signed a four-and-a-half year contract, but by the time the summer arrives, Luis Suarez will be be back from injury and Lautaro Martinez may well arrive from Inter Milan.
And as a result of his deal, Leganes will probably be in Spain's Segunda Division.
Rules are rules and Barcelona have not broken any here, but this allows one of the world's richest clubs to bring in a player (after Ousmane Dembele was ruled out for six months), while a team with one of the smallest budgets in LaLiga are powerless to prevent it.
👋 Welcome to your new home 🏡
⚽ @MartinBraith pic.twitter.com/2lfcwJKEmW— FC Barcelona (@FCBarcelona)
The biggest problem here is the rule itself. But Barcelona do not come out of this looking good, either. Ethically, plunging one of the top talents from a team fighting a relegation battle – and with no means to react – goes against the club's oft-preached values of sportsmanship and respect for others.
If Barca had signed Braithwaite in January, when they were initially interested but spent whole time trying and failing to bring in better forwards (including Arsenal's Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Valencia's Rodrigo Moreno and others), Leganes could have used the €18m to buy a replacement or even several new players.
As it is, the Madrid-based club (having also seen forward Youssef En-Nesyri bought by Sevilla in January) did apply to LaLiga for special permission to sign a new player after Barca moved for Braithwaite, but were met with a negative response.
"We believe that there is a regulation that is not fair, from which Barcelona has benefited," Leganes president Martin Ortega said on Thursday. "The injured party is Leganes."
Ortega did not put any blame on Barca. "They informed us of their intention on Monday, and the only escape route was the payment of the clause," he said. "We must not hold any grudge because they have made use of a possibility according to the rules in force."
The Leganes president said the Catalans had acted "correctly". A better explanation might have been to say they acted "within the rules".
Better planning by Barca in January, when not only did they fail to sign a striker but also let two forwards (La Masia graduates Carles Perez and Abel Ruiz) leave the club, could have seen all of this avoided.
Of course, they did not know then that Dembele would suffer another injury, but given the French forward's medical record since signing for the Catalan club in the summer of 2017, there was always a risk it might.
All of this should now lead to a rule change, but that will too late to help Leganes – even though their emergency is far greater than Barcelona's in LaLiga.
And even though the Catalans acted within the regulations, this kind of behaviour only serves to further tarnish an image which was once at the heart of their very being.
