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The Wolverhampton winger returns to what was his home on loan with a purchase option
Barcelona made official this Saturday what was an open secret for a couple of days. Adama Traoré returns to what was his home. The Wolverhampton winger is the new reinforcement for the team led by Xavi Hernández. He arrives on loan and the club chaired by Joan Laporta keeps a non-mandatory purchase option for about 30 million euros. This aspect was one of the last stumbling blocks of the operation, since Barça did not want to have any obligation to keep the footballer at the end of the season, but rather to evaluate his definitive incorporation based on the sporting and economic circumstances.
The landing of Adama Traoré expands the options that Xavi Hernández has on the offensive front and also serves as an element of pressure for Ousmane Dembélé, with whom the Spanish international shares a demarcation. Barça has given an ultimatum to the French winger, who has still not renewed the link with the club that expires on June 30. The coach made it clear that if he does not extend that contract, he will have to leave before the transfer market closes next Monday, since otherwise he will not line up for the remainder of the course. But time passes and the situation remains entrenched, which, in turn, blocks other operations, such as the arrival of Álvaro Morata, increasingly complicated, or that of Gabonese striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, from Arsenal, since to carry out Some of these additions would have to be paid by Barça beforehand.
A need that does not occur in the case of Adama, since the Wolverhampton footballer assumes a reduced salary until the end of the season in the hope of winning a contract for years to come. His goal is to make his way into Xavi Hernández’s schemes, despite offering a profile, a priori, against the Barça style.
Trained at La Masia
Trained at La Masia, Adama, of Malian origin although born in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat on January 25, 1996, made his debut with the Barça first team in the 2013-14 season, when Tata Martino gave him the alternative in a league match against Granada in which the azulgranas won 4-0. The youth squad, who was 17 years, 9 months and 29 days old, came on in the 83rd minute, replacing Neymar.
But in the summer of 2015 he left for the Premier League. Aston Villa paid 10 million euros that year for a winger whose main characteristic was physical power. He played a total of twelve games with the ‘villains’, scoring one goal and dishing out two assists, before being transferred to Middlesbrough in 2016, where he participated in 71 games, resulting in five goals and thirteen assists, spread over two seasons. From there he made the leap to Wolverhampton, where he has finished exploding.
With the ‘wolves’ he has made 154 appearances, registering eleven goals and eighteen assists. But this season he had lost prominence in the team coached by the Portuguese Bruno Lage, displaced by another old acquaintance from the culé parish, the Portuguese Francisco Trincao. He has played 20 games since the beginning of the course, being a starter in eleven of them and accumulating 1,184 minutes. He has only been able to score a goal and has not distributed any assistance.
Adama, whom Luis Enrique made his debut with the Spanish team in a friendly against Portugal held in September 2020 and has nine international caps with La Roja, seeks to increase his share of prominence at Barça, being the third reinforcement of the Barça team in this market winter, after the arrivals of Dani Alves and Ferran Torres. Adama’s presentation will take place next Wednesday in an act that will not be attended by the public due to the pandemic.