Barcelona have agreed personal terms with Lautaro Martinez and are now preparing a first offer for the Inter Milan captain worth less than €100 million, according to El Chiringuito TV. After a summer spent chasing Julian Alvarez and being told no at every turn, Barca finally have a striker file that is moving. What they do not yet have is an Italian club willing to sit down and talk about it.
Here is what this piece covers:
- Exactly what El Chiringuito report about the personal terms and the opening bid
- Why the No 9 hole is the defining problem of Barca’s summer
- Inter’s stance – the hardest part of the whole deal
- The names still on Deco’s list if Milan will not budge
- The clock: eleven days until the window shuts on 31 August
How Barca got here: 54 goals out of the door
Every part of this story starts with subtraction. Robert Lewandowski left for Chicago Fire. Ferran Torres was sold to Paris Saint-Germain. Marcus Rashford’s loan expired and he went back to Manchester United. Writing in Mundo Deportivo, columnist Xavier Bosch put a number on what that means: between them those three scored 54 goals last season, 37 per cent of Barca’s 145.
Bosch’s wider point is sharper still. When the window opened, the plan on Mundo Deportivo’s front page was a centre-back and a centre-forward, plus the returns of Cancelo and Rashford. The centre-back conversation has quietly disappeared. Cancelo is back, permanently. The golden chance to sign Rodri from Manchester City was taken. And in place of a striker, Barca have signed three wingers: Anthony Gordon, Karim Adeyemi and Jesse Bisiwu.
They are good signings. They are not a No 9. Bosch notes that Barcelona have won each of their last four Champions Leagues with a genuine reference centre-forward in the side – Samuel Eto’o, David Villa, Luis Suarez – and that Hansi Flick, of all people, will not need that pointed out to him.
The Lautaro Martinez to Barcelona file: what is actually reported
Personal terms are done
According to El Chiringuito TV, sporting director Deco and Bojan Krkic met Lautaro’s representative in Madrid last week, and those talks produced an agreement with the player over personal terms. The financial conditions of a potential contract have already been discussed, which means the player’s side of the deal is, in effect, parked and ready. If Barca ever reach an agreement with Inter, they will not lose time haggling over a salary.
The offer is being built – and it starts below €100m
The second strand of the same reporting, carried on Friday morning by Barca Universal, is that Barca are working on an initial proposal worth less than €100 million and genuinely believe the whole thing could be concluded below that figure. There is said to be growing confidence in Catalonia that the situation could progress significantly next week – while the same report concedes that an agreement remains far from straightforward.
The internal backing
What separates this from the usual August noise is that the support runs all the way up the building. Flick is described as an admirer of the Inter captain. Deco views him positively. Barca are said to be encouraged by their existing relationship with Lautaro and the people around him, built up over months of quiet contacts. Other names remain on the shortlist, but the reporting is consistent that the Argentine is now the preferred option.
That matters because of something Deco said out loud. Speaking after the 2-1 Joan Gamper Trophy win over Al Ahly, the sporting director confirmed there would be a move in the centre-forward position before the deadline. Mundo Deportivo report that a goalkeeper and a centre-back also remain live possibilities, but the No 9 was the only position Deco specifically named.
The problem: Inter are not for turning
Here is the wall. Barcelona have not made an offer to Inter Milan. Inter are not expecting one. And, per El Chiringuito, the Serie A side have no interest in opening talks over their captain even if a bid does land.
None of that should surprise anyone. Lautaro is not a squad asset Inter are looking to move on; he is the man who wears the armband, the emotional centre of the team and one of the few players in Serie A whose departure would be read as a statement of decline. Selling him to a LaLiga heavyweight eleven days before the window shuts, with no realistic time to reinvest, is close to the worst possible version of the deal from Milan’s point of view.
Barca’s calculation appears to be that an opening bid changes the temperature – that a concrete number below €100m gets Inter into a room, and that the player’s own willingness does the rest. It is a reasonable theory. It is also more or less the theory Barca ran with Atletico Madrid over Julian Alvarez, and that one ended with nobody moving at all.
If Inter say no: the rest of the list
The Alvarez saga is the cautionary tale here, and it is still not entirely dead. Mundo Deportivo maintain that the Argentine remains the striker Flick wants most and the one Deco likes best, despite Atletico’s inflexible stance. Bosch writes that Laporta admitted during the World Cup that Barca’s €100m offer expired on 31 July, and that Atletico have been holding out for €150m which, in his view, is never going to arrive. Even an agreed sale to Arsenal was reportedly refused by the player himself. Everybody wants a different outcome, so nothing happens.
Behind Lautaro, two other names keep surfacing. Cope’s Victor Navarro, via Barca Blaugranes, reports that Arsenal’s Viktor Gyokeres has been “offering himself to Barcelona daily”, though it is not known whether there is any interest coming back the other way. The more intriguing name is Nicolo Tresoldi, the 21-year-old Club Brugge forward who Navarro says is “very, very much liked” inside the club; Diario AS also place him prominently on the shortlist. We looked at both of those options in more detail here.
And then there is the squad Flick already has. Mundo Deportivo’s Joan Poqui made the point neatly this week: the Gamper showed a team with genuine depth in almost every position, with one glaring exception. Hamza Abdelkarim, the teenage Egyptian promoted from the B team after arriving in the winter window, is the only out-and-out penalty-box centre-forward at the club. For the more mobile false-nine role Flick has options – he has already tried Raphinha and Gordon there, and Adeyemi, Dani Olmo and Fermin Lopez could all do a version of it. What he does not have is a finisher.
What happens next
Three things to watch between now and 31 August:
- Whether the bid is actually lodged. Everything reported so far concerns preparation, not submission. Until a number reaches Milan, this remains an intention.
- Inter’s tone. A flat public refusal would be the end of it. Silence, or a fee floated in the Italian press, would mean the opposite.
- Barca’s Plan C. If Lautaro stalls the way Alvarez did, there is no time left to run a third pursuit at leisure. Tresoldi, notably, would be a far simpler negotiation.
In the meantime the season starts regardless. Barca open their LaLiga title defence away at Elche on Sunday night, with Hamza the likeliest man to lead the line and a squad that, in every other department, looks deeper than it did in June.
The last word
Barca have done the easy half of a very hard deal. Personal terms with one of Europe’s best strikers, agreed inside a week, is not nothing – it tells you Lautaro is open to this, and that Deco has been working the file properly rather than briefing hope. But the difficult half sits entirely in Milan’s hands, and Inter have given no indication they intend to help.
Somewhere in the Camp Nou kit room, the No 9 shirt Lewandowski vacated is still unassigned. Eleven days to find someone worth giving it to. Keep it on ReadBarcelona’s No 9 coverage – this one is going to move quickly, in one direction or the other.
