Antonie Griezmann is another player who is loaned out by Barcelona for a couple of seasons to their arch rivals Ateltico Madrid. Back in the summer of 2021 Barca and Ateltico had reached an agreement over the transfer of the striker where he’ll spend 2 years on loan at Madrid and if he had played over 50% [minimum 45 minutes] of the matches during the spell, Simeone’s side would be obligated to buy Antoine for a fee of 40 Million Euros.
Once deal was done between the clubs, everyone thought that the transfer would get permanent eventually, but now the Frenchman is in a difficult situation with Ateltico because of that buy option.
Now last season, Simeone used the striker very frequently in his team as Griezann appeared in 30 out of the 37 games that he was available for which basically meant that he played over 81% of the times. So that made the deal almost certain and it would get completed in 2023.
Athletico exploits loop hole in Griezmann’s contract details
However, this summer transfer window Atletico Madrid started to get frustrated cause they wanted to sign players and improve the squad but in La Liga there are a lot of salary restrictions and it’s very difficult to register players.
So they realised that the Frenchman was taking an astronomical amount of salary and hence they looked throughout the summer to see if he can offload the striker or end the loan but in the end, nothing happened and he stayed.
Towards the end of the transfer window, they even asked Barca to negotiate on a deal if they could all agree on a deal which would be less than 40 Million Euros, but unsurprisingly the Catalan Giants rejected this offer and told them to follow the agreement cause they did not want to take a loss on the deal.
However since then, Atletico made a decision of making Griezmann play less than 45 minutes in each of their game so that they don’t have to pay the 40 Million for the player. And they did that in spite of the Frenchman’s good performances cause he scored 2 goals in 4 games and still they just keep giving him only 30 minutes in the game as he comes off the bench just after the 60-minute mark. All in all, it would be interesting to see how this transfer saga develops.
