Chelsea manager Thomas Tuchel hinted at another move to Barcelona after yesterday’s win over Everton.
“Yes, that’s true,” said Tuchel, confirming that the experienced Marcos Alonso is joining the ranks of Barcelona, who also hired Andres Christensen from the London club at the beginning of the summer, while Cesar Azpilicueta still stayed with the extension of the contract.
Alonso has been a Chelsea player since 2016 and has played 211 games for the Blues, scoring 29 goals with 23 assists. In addition, he won the Premier League, the FA Cup, the Champions League and the Europa League.
He missed Saturday’s Premier League first-round tie against Everton, which Chelsea won 1-0, and is now understood to strengthen the Catalan club’s defence.
He asked us to leave the club and we agreed. It made no sense to put him on the field, so Ben Chilwell played,” says the German coach.
Interestingly, Chelsea and Barcelona fought for several of the same players this summer, but mostly the Catalans came out victorious in the end. The most famous case of this boy was that of Gilles Kuned who eventually signed for Barca.
Barcelona had an incredible transfer window, so Lewandowski, Kessie, Christensen, Quande, Rafinha came, and soon they will sign Alonso.
As for the departures, some have already left the team, some are yet to do so, while it seems that BiH international Miralem Pjanic will remain at coach Xavi’s decision and will be a replacement for the experienced Sergio Busquets.
For that, he will have to reduce his salary by 40 percent. This is not a problem for the BH midfielder and he has already agreed to forego a significant fee for his stay at the club.
Miralem has a gross salary of almost 16 million euros (15,620,000). When tax is deducted, that annual salary is around eight million euros net. By agreeing to the reduction, Pjanic would earn a little less than five million euros net per year.
It is certainly interesting that last season Pjanic decided to reduce his salary by a significant amount. Mundo Deportivo state that he gave up a whopping 60 percent or €9.4 million gross.
Thus, the BH midfielder received a net salary of 4.7 million euros from the club last season, but according to certain information from Turkey, Besiktas also paid him two million euros for coming on loan, thus making up for the ‘loss’ in Barcelona.
