FC Barcelona Will Look To Replace Captain Busquets In January With Big Signing And Have Found Their Man

FC Barcelona will look to find a replacement for their captain Sergio Busquets in the January transfer window and spend big on him.

Busquets’ contract expires in the summer just over a fortnight before he turns 35, and everything seems to point towards him finally ending a 14-year tenure in the Catalans’ first team that has yielded no end of success in terms of silverware save for the last three barren seasons.

Busquets will go down in the Blaugrana’s history books as one of the club’s greatest ever pivots, and one of the best in football overall for that matter.

To this end, finding a replacement for the number ‘5’ is no easy task. Yet it is one that president Joan Laporta and Xavi Hernandez look to get underway in the January transfer window according to SPORT on Tuesday morning.

Like so many things at the Camp Nou as of late, potential developments depend on what happens with Frenkie de Jong.

The Dutchman’s natural position is also Busquets’, but he has been unable to inhabit it since joining the club from Ajax in 2019 and now finds himself attached to the biggest transfer saga of the summer.

Manchester United and Barca agreed an €85mn ($87mn) deal for De Jong in mid-July, but the 25-year-old turned the English outfit down due to a lack of Champions League football plus a dispute over pay and his contract with Barca that could head to the courts.

Chelsea are also interested in the playmaker, but with the current window closing in two weeks, time is ticking to offload him.

SPORT say that Barca planned to spend big next summer to find Busquets’ replacement, but this plan could be brought forward to the turn of 2023 when revelations might have also been made at the winter World Cup in November and December.

Wolverhampton Wanderers’ Ruben Neves is Barca’s top target for the position, and Miralem Pjanic could put in a shift in that area of the park until a purchase is made despite Xavi and his staff seeing the Bosnian as more of an interior.

With Busquets banned due to the red card he picked up against Rayo Vallecano on Saturday, Pjanic or De Jong could audition for the role away at Real Sociedad on Sunday night.