Amid celebrations for the titles won this season, Barcelona is already rolling up its sleeves to plan for next season with the clear priority of finalizing contract renewals. A few days ago, Laporta assured fans after winning LaLiga that the agreement with coach Hansi Flick was finalized, and now he has addressed the issue of extending Lamine Yamal’s contract.
Barça president Joan Laporta spoke to the newspaper La Vanguardia and revealed some details of Lamine Yamal’s renewal. “He is a genius who enjoys Barça, who has friends at Barça and who, moreover, is part of this generation that has spent a lot of time together with his teammates. He is a player of superlative individual talent, but he is also a team player and he is happy here. He also has an agent, Jorge Mendes, with whom we have good communication. His renewal is practically agreed, it just needs to be ratified,” he said.
One of the main points in the negotiations for the player’s renewal was the financial aspect, as the youth player wanted to be paid in line with what he brings to the team. In response, Laporta stated that “at Barça, we pay our players according to their abilities. We are a club that pays well. We also say that there is no better place to be than at Barça. It is another thing to say that not everyone can play on the same team and that you cannot have all the good players in the world. That is the key to the team. Lamine is a player who can succeed anywhere. We know that. It happened to me with Leo Messi, who was wanted by Inter. In the end, we all decided, including Leo’s father, that he would have the best project at Barça. And that’s how it turned out, because he became the best in history. Lamine, at 17, is one of the best in the world. He’s happy and so is his family,” he concluded.
Laporta was also asked about other renewals, such as those of Raphinha and De Jong. As for the Brazilian, he did not seem surprised by the great performance of a player who “is also very happy in the city. Securing his future is one of the pending issues we have for the coming days or weeks. We don’t want to have any players with a year left on their contract. We want them to stay for more years because they have earned it and because it is also in our interest as a club to keep this group, which is a winning one.”
In this regard, Laporta assured that with De Jong “we are working on his renewal. He is very excited, we are very determined to do whatever it takes to keep him, and well, he is sorting out some personal and professional matters, and when that is settled, we will be able to announce that he is staying with us.”
To close the chapter on renewals, Laporta spoke about goalkeeper Szczesny. “We want him to stay. The other day he was celebrating the victory by smoking a cigar. I saw that he wanted to stay. We also have good goalkeepers in the reserve team and in the youth academy.”