Glorified loan - unless the buy back is a ridiculous fee. Which it won't be...
Shouldn't be doing them after their antics over Deulofeu.
But hey, beggars cant be choosers and we were beggers at centre half.
It all depends on the buy back fee, I think. It was something I hope we'd learnt our lesson from with Deulofeu, but in the club's defence, our window shuts a lot earlier which gives Barca extra negotiating ammunition. Perhaps this is why it's taken so long to wrap the deal up?
Hopefully the buy back is a large fee. At the very least it will be over £30m and thus not the quick and easy 'cash in, cash out' deal they had with Deulofeu, where they had nothing to lose by paying us a measly £10m or whatever it was. Unless Mina tears it up here and their buy back is barely more than what we paid, it's unlikely they'll activate it. But time will tell. At least it means we have another centre back in for the season.