The first reason is purely sporting. Atl\u00e9tico have slammed the door not just on Barcelona but on everyone. Gil Mar\u00edn could not have been clearer: “We will not accept 100, 150 or 200 million for Juli\u00e1n,” and he stood firm on the astronomical release clause of 500 million euros.<\/p>\n
Diego Simeone’s side have taken a qualitative leap this summer. In have come heavyweight names such as Cuti Romero, Hummels, Kang-in Lee and Grimaldo, alongside Arnau Ortiz.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The standout piece, though, is the one the trophy-chasing project is built on: the attack. As Cholo put it after the draw with Villarreal: “If we want to win a title, we need to be together and to have important forwards. We have that and we must keep it.”<\/p>\n
The numbers back him up. \u00c1lvarez is today the third most expensive forward in the world at a value of 120 million euros according to Transfermarkt, behind only Haaland and Mbapp\u00e9. Ten goals in the Champions League carried the team to the semi-finals despite an ankle injury, proof that he cannot be replaced in a crazy market where prices run 43% above true value.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There is no pressure to sell for the sake of financial fair play, and the Apollo fund has arrived to raise the ambition. Selling the star would be a step backwards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first reason is purely sporting. Atl\u00e9tico have slammed the door not just on Barcelona but on everyone.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75459,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[179,92,418,6458],"class_list":["post-75458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-barcelona","tag-atletico-madrid","tag-barcelona","tag-features","tag-j-alvarez"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75458","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=75458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}