How Barcelona will try to steal Kounde from Chelsea
Robin Bairner
- Updated: 21 Jul 2022 13:55 BST
- 3 min read
Barcelona are plotting a last-ditch bid to try to prevent Sevilla defender Jules Kounde from joining Chelsea, according to reports in Spain.
Kounde has been lined up by the Blues as their primary target in central defence, where they have lost Andreas Christensen to the Catalans and Antonio Rudiger to Real Madrid, both on free transfers.
REVEALED: The world's most valuable footballers
Chelsea are widely reported now to have agreed a deal with Sevilla for a transfer, with FootballTransfers understanding that the hold up has been to see if Barca were prepared to make a reciprocal offer.
While reports in Spain suggest Chelsea will pay up to €65m for the 23-year-old, FootballTransfers can confirm the deal is worth €60m, €5m of which is dependant on bonuses.
Related articles
Barcelona to appeal to Kounde
It was not expected that Barcelona would be able to match Chelsea’s approach, and indeed they cannot. Sport reports that they will instead appeal to Kounde to push for a move to Camp Nou instead of the Premier League side. If he were to do this, it would involve Sevilla accepting a smaller transfer fee – and it would also mean that he would earn a smaller wage than he is set to get at Stamford Bridge.
Barcelona have previously leveraged a player’s desire to leave his club already this summer, doing so in the cases of both Raphinha and Robert Lewandowski, though they were not as successful in terms of driving the Poland striker’s transfer fee down.
The Kounde case promises to be more difficult than each of those deals, though. In both of those cases, Barcelona were the clear frontrunners for the player and, in the Lewandowski example, the only bidder.
Sevilla, meanwhile, have shown a hard-nosed approach to selling Kounde in the past. They refused to back down from their demands Chelsea meet the defender’s €80m asking price last summer, for example. It is FootballTransfers’ understanding that there will be no cut-price deal made for Barcelona on this occasion, with the Ramon Sanchez-Pizjuan side also facing financial problems.
Barcelona’s late move for Kounde, then, appears unlikely to prevent him from leaving Sevilla to make a long-awaited Chelsea transfer.
