This is a trend that we have been observing among the biggest European clubs for years now. More and more, the best teams in the Old Continent are looking for players who are still teenagers from the four corners of the planet. All with the aim of anticipating and having them in their ranks, rather than seeing them explode elsewhere and therefore become inaccessible or too expensive. Real Madrid, for example, has become a specialist in this area, with the examples of players like Martin Odegaard, Fede Valverde or Vinicius Junior, among others. Obviously, the secondary or slightly less powerful clubs followed the fashion…
In Spain, a transfer is causing a lot of talk at the moment. At the very end of the transfer window, Athletic Club enlisted Igor Oyono, a young nugget from Villarreal, then aged 15. A particularly promising striker, already an U17 international with Spain, and who can play with the Bilbao club because he was born in Barakaldo in the Basque Country, and is therefore fully in line with the club’s philosophy. A controversial transfer, firstly because it is a transfer of a particularly young player, which is quite unusual in Spain.
A rather murky operation
But above all, the modalities and contours of the operation are quite vague. And this is what enrages the management of Villarreal. There Cadena COPE for example, has just revealed that Athletic spent a total of 11.5 million euros to purchase it. A good operation for the Yellow Submarine? Not really, since the Basque club would have given 5 million euros to the player’s parents, and another 5 million euros to the teenager’s agents. Villarreal therefore only recovered 1.5 million euros – training compensation – for its player who had not yet signed his professional contract. Relations between the two clubs are now broken, and the management of Villarreal did not appear during the meal between the leaders of the two clubs before the match on April 14.
“Athletic acted in a way that I don’t even want to talk about”, explained Fernando Roig, president of Villarreal, who was counting a lot on Oyono for the future. For its part, Athletic insisted on denying these sums and explains “having respected the contract that the player had with Villarreal”. The transfer is also being talked about outside of the fans or the media following the news of the two clubs, since many believe that it perfectly represents the excesses of current football. And cases like Oyono, there should be many more in the future…
