Barcelona Reportedly Make Embarrassing Move for Thomas Lemar

This is turning out to be a summer where Barcelona have shown a ridiculous amount of weakness, pettiness, and incompetence in the transfer market. Signing Paulinho, losing Neymar, making ridiculous bids for Philippe Coutinho, leading Ousmane Dembélé astray to sign him, messing Jean-Michael Seri around, letting one of the greatest players in football history enter the last year of his contract, and now a desperate attempt to sign Thomas Lemar.

According to SPORT, Barcelona have hastened attempts to sign the cerebral AS Monaco star. Thomas Lemar is the type of player that Barcelona need, but negotiations have been opened with the aim of blocking Liverpool as much as with finding a plan B to Coutinho. Contact has reportedly been made and the response is rumoured to be positive, according to the completely unbiased daily sports newspaper that is Barcelona’s mouthpiece.

Josep Bartomeu is providing shambolic leadership that is pushing Coutinho even further away from Barcelona. Unlike Southampton, Liverpool can refuse to sell Coutinho this summer without any financial pressures of needing to sell in order to buy players. Naby Keïta is coming next summer, but in the interim, Liverpool can thrive with adding Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Virgil van Dijk along with keeping Coutinho. This does not look like operating under any form of duress whatsoever.

Thomas Lemar is a wonderfully talented player with the sweetest of left foots, game intelligence, positional flexibiliy, spatial awareness, and an appetite for the grand occasion; moreover, Liverpool want to make him the club’s record signing and have flown to Monaco to ensure this happens. If, however, Lemar’s head has been turned then Liverpool have options. This may be a rumour spun to put pressure on Liverpool or this could actually be a concrete move for reasons outlined above.

Either way, Liverpool do not need to take Barcelona seriously whatever transpires between now and the transfer deadline.