Barcelona want Álvarez. They still cannot register the last four.

Aug 20

5 min read

Julián Álvarez was left out of Atlético Madrid's squad for the season opener on Wednesday.

Diego Simeone said the day before that Álvarez was not physically ready after the World Cup, that he needed more training to be right for Sunday, and that the club still believes in building a team around him. Every word of that can be true and the picture still looks like what it looks like. The framing everywhere is that Atlético are the obstacle. Simeone will not move, the board will not sell to a league rival, the release clause is set at a number nobody will ever pay. All accurate. It is also only half of the problem, and the other half is sitting in Barcelona.

The half nobody is counting

Barcelona have had a busy summer. Anthony Gordon arrived from Newcastle in May, Karim Adeyemi from Dortmund in July, Jesse Bisiwu from Club Brugge, then João Cancelo on a free and Rodri from Manchester City this week. ESPN puts the fees at roughly €70m, €22m and €8.5m for the first three. As of Wednesday, the only new first-team licence Barcelona had processed with LaLiga belonged to Héctor Fort, a full-back back from a loan at Elche who is expected to leave. Gordon and Adeyemi, bought three months and one month ago, are still waiting. So are Bisiwu and Andreas Christensen. That is the club that reportedly bid €100m for Álvarez. They cannot currently register the players they have already paid for. None of this is new for Barcelona, which is rather the point. They did the same thing last August, and the August before, and the Dani Olmo case went past the wire and into a legal argument with their own league. Sports Illustrated described the current plan as a chain of assumptions: deregister Ronald Araújo after his loan to Liverpool, use Roony Bardghji's cruciate injury to open a long-term-injury slot, bank the Ferran Torres money from Paris Saint-Germain, move Marc Casadó on. Some of that has happened. Some of it has not, and Casadó is still there. Barcelona do not play their opener until 27 August, because their fixture was deferred to give the World Cup players longer. So there is still time. There is just not very much of it, and a fifth signing at nine figures is a strange thing to be chasing while four earlier ones sit in a queue.

What Atlético have actually said, and what they have not

Álvarez's position has been public since June. After Argentina beat Austria 2-0 at the World Cup he told reporters he had spoken to the people at the club he needed to speak to, that a transfer was the best thing for everyone, and that he wanted to fulfil his dream. That dream, everyone involved accepts, is Barcelona. Atlético's answer has been the same every time somebody has asked. Chief executive Miguel Ángel Gil Marín set the line publicly on 17 July. Simeone repeated it on Tuesday in his own way: when the head of a club speaks that clearly, there is nothing left to add, and he compared it to a court where there is no more room for doubt. The numbers underneath are less settled than the position. Barcelona's rejected offer is consistently reported at €100m. Real Madrid's, made earlier in the window, is reported at €150m by some Spanish and English outlets and €120m by others. Nobody has published the actual documents, and Atlético have never confirmed a figure. Treat both as reported rather than known. What Atlético paid is clearer. He cost €75m from Manchester City in August 2024, plus around €20m in variables, which is why you will sometimes see the deal written up as €95m. In his first season he scored 24 goals with five assists and Atlético finished third.

The clause is the door, and it is bricked up

His contract runs to June 2030. The release clause is widely reported at €500m, a figure the club set in 2024 precisely so that this conversation could never happen. That matters more in Spain than it would in England, because a clause there is not simply a price tag. Depositing it with LaLiga is the one route out that does not require the selling club's consent. Everything else needs Atlético to say yes, and Atlético keep saying no. Which leaves the courts. Crónica Global, which is the only outlet to have worked through this properly, set out the theory in August: a player could go to the social courts arguing the clause is disproportionate, or leave with formal notice and litigate afterwards. The same piece is honest about why it probably goes nowhere. Barcelona themselves carry clauses closer to a billion euros in their own squad, so the practice is entirely normal in Spanish football and hard to call abusive. And Álvarez signed the contract that contains his.

Wednesday was also an argument

Here is the part that will annoy him most. Atlético did not look like a team missing its best player. They controlled the game, took 13 shots, and scored through a front line of Ademola Lookman, Carlos Martín and the newly promoted Arnau Ortiz. Simeone's summer has been busy in its own right: Cuti Romero from Tottenham, Álex Grimaldo, Lee Kang-in and Morten Hjulmand, with Facundo Ruggeri leaving for Aston Villa. Whatever else is true, this is not a squad that collapses without one forward. That gives the board exactly what it needs. If Atlético win without him, the refusal to sell looks like strength rather than spite. Meanwhile the mood around the player has gone somewhere unpleasant. Cadena SER reported that Simeone spoke to Álvarez last week and told him nothing had changed, and that people close to the forward feel deceived by how the club has handled it, having been encouraged to make his position public in the first place. Sport reported that Atlético's real worry is no longer Barcelona at all, but what this does to Álvarez's season and his relationship with the supporters. His official squad photograph, released on Wednesday, went round social media because he is not smiling in it.

What the deadlock is for

Look at who is uncomfortable here, and who is not. Atlético keep a player, their price, their precedent and a reputation for not being anybody's supermarket. Barcelona get to tell their members they went for a World Cup winner, without ever having to prove they could have found the salary room. Arsenal made their calls, were told Barcelona was the priority, and moved on to Victor Osimhen. Everyone in this has an acceptable outcome except the man in the photograph. And because that contract runs to 2030, none of this expires on 1 September. It just goes quiet until January, then next summer, then the one after. Barcelona have eleven days to register four players they already own, before they can seriously discuss a fifth they do not.