Former Barcelona president Joan Gaspart has reacted to Nico Williams rejecting the Spanish club and extending his stay at Athletic Bilbao. He recently revealed that Bilbao is in trouble after the latest bumper contract the youngster signed.
Speaking to the press, Joan shared that Bilbao giving Nico a massive salary to keep him around will eventually cause problems within the entire squad.
According to him, as soon as other Athletic Bilbao players find out that they’re earning half of what Nico Williams gets weekly, they will most likely start demanding an increment as well.
He stated that even the fans of the club will begin to put pressure on the youngster to perform according to the wages he is collecting.
“Nico is a great player, but now the problem is Bilbao. When the players realise they’re earning half, half, half of what Nico earns, they’re not going to like it. And the fans, if this player doesn’t score 50 goals, they’re going to boo him, right?” he said.
Joan further noted that if he was in charge of negotiations at Barcelona, Nico Williams and his agent wouldn’t have been able to use Barca during the transfer saga.
Gaspart concluded by saying that he wasn’t even paid to run things at the club when he was president, and he actually ran the affairs of the club out of sheer passion.
“There was no passion, and it’s not a criticism of [sporting director] Deco, who is a professional who is at Barcelona today and might be at another team tomorrow that pays him more I wasn’t paid for what I did. I did it out of passion. And when you do it with passion, it’s very difficult for things to slip away.
Barcelona is a club of passion. And passion isn’t instilled by a professional, it’s carried by the one who has it.
The one who doesn’t get paid to be a Barca fan. Don’t tell me stories! I’ve signed [Diego] Maradona, Rivaldo, [Andoni] Zubizarreta, [Jose Mari] Bakero… I’ve signed them and nothing like that has ever happened to me… That intermediary Nico Williams has wouldn’t have fooled me,” he added.
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