Adama Traoré Aston Villa Contract Details
It seems Aston Villa’s signing of Adama Traoré from Barcelona wasn’t the most clean cut of transfers. The delay in nailing down the deal that was at one point a loan, then a three-year deal and now a five-year deal, was obviously down to Barcelona wanting to future-proof their decision to let one of the bright lights of their academy and ‘B’ team go.
A section of Barcelona fans also weren’t too happy about the 19-year-old’s transfer out of the club, so that’s perhaps why Barcelona have shown transparency to their fans regarding the finer details of the ‘five-year’ deal.
The Adama Traoré Deal Small Print
First of all Barcelona state on their website that the deal is for €10m plus €2m odd-ons for the player who made four appearances for the first team and 63 games for Barca B.
Now the interesting part of their transparency…and something that is important for Villa supporters to know, especially after the nonsense of Fabian Delph’s secret release clause.
‘The club reserves the right to repurchase the player during the first three years of the player’s contract and a right of first refusal for a possible future transfer after that period.’
(Translation from Barcelona website in Spanish)
When you read this small print, if the player really excels at Villa Park, Villa have in essence a glorified loan with potential of a quick profit. I say, ‘quick profit’ assuming there is a set buy-back price that isn’t as naive as the token gesture release clause they agreed with the Delph contract.
Also, hopefully any buy back price within this three-year period increases as every season passes.
Will Traoré Return?
With this three-year repurchase right, Barcelona still have a strong grip on the player, but what Villa have is a deal that is better than a loan, but not exactly an outright purchase of the player.
However, it’s not exactly as simple as: ‘if Adama Traoré does great he goes back to Barca, and if he’s average, he stays at Villa’. The player would only interest Barcelona in re-signing him, if he really excels. After all, he’ll have to be great to get in the Barcelona team and they wouldn’t have let him go in the first place if they were 100% certain he would develop into a Barca first teamer.
How many Villa players of the last ten years would have got into a Barcelona first team? Zero to not many. So Traoré could perform very well for Villa, yet still not interest Barcelona enough to buy him back.
With this transfer, it’s almost as if Barcelona have issued the player a challenge – prove yourself good enough for us. And that can only benefit Villa.
If Traoré does prove himself good enough for a return back to Barcelona, we’ll be sad to lose him, but it would have meant he’d have murdered a few Premier League defences along the way!
UTV
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Don’t think I am too unhappy being Barca’s training club or developing a link for future transfers.. Though I am struggling to recall a great performance from Delafou or the Stoke barca B team that Hughes has. What happened at that dinner so Adama didn’t go there I wonder. Moving it to 5 from 3 years was a win even with the buyback, 4th year of the contract could be jackpot for Villa. New DOF is really impressing me.
Imagine your a right back and you have Bac n Ada bearing down on you? Which do you cover? 🙂 UTV
they had a similar thing with Bojan when he went to Roma and a few others, none of them ended up going back either, he’s still raw and unpredictable will prob peak around 23ish.
Ok so what if he does pretty well and someone like Liverpool want him, what’s to stop them negotiating a deal through Barcelona whereby they activate the clause just to sell him on? Is that possible?
Does that mean if he scored a couple of hat-tricks in the first few months, he could be gone by the New Year?, which brings me to another point…. can he only be bought back during a transfer window? It’s that ‘anytime during the first 3 years’ line that worries me.
As Dan Walden points out on our FB page, if he does go back to Barca at some stage because of the deal, it would be much better than him going to Manchester City! UTV
Sounds win win