Barcelona Snubbed Neymar To Sign $143M Forward In 2019, Reveals Eric Abidal

FC Barcelona chose to sign Antoine Griezmann instead of Neymar in the summer of 2019, the club’s former skipper Eric Abidal has claimed.

Neymar moved from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) at a world-record transfer of $265 million ahead of the 2017-18 season. Two years later, the Ligue 1 champions were open to selling Neymar back to the Catalans but then-president Josep Maria Bartomeu instead opted to go for Atletico Madrid’s Griezmann, according to Abidal.

"Ten days before the end of the transfer window, I went to Paris to talk with Leonardo (PSG’s sporting director) and I was with my CEO, and we were talking about Neymar. If we didn’t sign Griezmann before, I think 100 percent we could have resigned Neymar because what we needed was a winger and when Neymar was at Barcelona, he was amazing. This is not about which player is better, it was what I thought was the position we needed at the time. The team needed a real winger. The president decided to sign Griezmann," Abidal told The Telegraph.

After failing to sign Griezmann in 2018, Barcelona finally landed him at Camp Nou the following year by meeting his hefty buy-out clause of $143 million at Atletico. While he had initially struggled in his debut season, Griezmann has finally settled in under new head coach Ronald Koeman. The French forward has netted 14 goals this season in 40 games, across competitions.

During Neymar’s stint at Camp Nou, he had struck a great partnership with Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez as Barcelona’s front-line. The famous trio was nicknamed as 'MSN' as it had established as one of the fiercest front-lines in European soccer. Despite helping the club win several trophies and scoring over 100 competitive goals across the four seasons with Barcelona, Neymar did not part ways with Barcelona on good terms.

Neymar and Barcelona had a fallout as they got involved in a court battle. Neymar claimed that the Blaugrana owed him an unpaid bonus of $51 million following the last contract he signed with the club in 2016. But the La Liga giants won the case and the court decided Neymar owed them $8 million, ESPN had reported.

"One of the arguments against Neymar was that he had a court case against the club, so it’s not easy. They said he would have to stop the court process if he wanted to come back. That wasn’t my problem because I was not at the club when that dispute happened. In my view, I could sign the player, but it didn’t happen," added Abidal, who also served as the club’s sporting director for two years under Bartoemu’s reign.