was granted indefinite leave by Barcelona<\/a> at the beginning of December after requesting a period of absence. He returned to the team at the end of January.<\/p>\nIn total, he has made 213 first-team appearances for Barca since joining from Uruguayan club Boston River in January 2019.<\/p>\n
Defensive signing a Liverpool necessity<\/p>\n
Analysis by The Athletic\u2019s Gregg Evans<\/p>\n
Liverpool are light on numbers in defence so this doesn\u2019t come as much of a surprise.<\/p>\n
With Konate leaving for Madrid they were already a man down before other setbacks in recent weeks left the backline in clear need of reinforcements.<\/p>\n
Gomez faces a spell on the sidelines and set to miss the start of the season, Jacquet yet to feature across pre-season and Leoni recovering from a long-term injury and still not back in full training, it would have been too much of a risk to start the campaign with Virgil van Dijk as the only fit senior centre-half.<\/p>\n
Head coach Iraola expressed his concerns last week when he admitted that reinforcements were needed, and Araujo will tick a lot of boxes. At 27, he\u2019s experienced and will be able to lean on the knowledge gained from playing at Barcelona since 2019.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s a right-footed centre-back who may also be able to cover at right-back if needed, and that will help because Bradley is still out injured and the options elsewhere are limited. Liverpool have great faith in Jacquet and Leoni progressing in the future but they are both still young and have spent significant time on the sidelines recently, so the option of another experienced stopper to turn to will be vital.<\/p>\n
A change of Barca plans<\/p>\n
Analysis by Laia Cervello Herrero<\/p>\n
After a turbulent year on a personal level, Araujo wanted this to be his year at Barcelona.<\/p>\n
Before the World Cup, the possibility of leaving had not crossed the Uruguay international\u2019s mind, and he was convinced he could once again become a key player for manager Hansi Flick.<\/p>\n
That was until a few days ago, when the German met with the centre-back and told him his plan was to stick with the same defensive system as last season and that Araujo would get playing time, but not a key role.<\/p>\n
The Liverpool option emerged within those two days and everything happened very quickly. Within a day, the deal was done \u2014 Liverpool agreed to cover the player\u2019s wages and the defender\u2019s agent travelled to meet with Barca\u2019s sporting director Deco.<\/p>\n
Araujo\u2019s departure means Barca will have greater scope to sign and register players, but it also leaves the club short-handed in a position where Flick had put a freeze on signings: centre-back. This changes Deco\u2019s plans and will force him and the club to head into the transfer market again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Liverpool are set to sign Barcelona defender Ronald Araujo on a season-long loan deal. Primarily a central defender,\u00a0Araujo…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67510,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[92,187,301,1818,100,3691],"class_list":["post-67509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-barcelona","tag-barcelona","tag-champions-league","tag-la-liga","tag-liverpool","tag-premier-league","tag-uruguay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}