Embattled Atlético Madrid midfielder Thomas Lemar is on his way to Girona, as the clubs on Wednesday confirmed that the World Cup winner will play in Catalonia this season on a simple loan.
Acuerdo con el @GironaFC para la cesión de Thomas Lemar, quien jugará esta temporada en el equipo catalán.
— Atlético de Madrid (@Atleti) July 30, 2025
➡️ https://t.co/rW9DEI6NFD
¡Te deseamos mucha suerte en este nuevo reto profesional, Thom! pic.twitter.com/sGCSBxuxQz
Girona and Atlético will split Lemar’s €3.3 million gross salary down the middle in order
to get him regular football at Montilivi, which would be the 29-year-old’s first such spell of playing time since the 2022/23 season.
Diego Simeone often has spoken fondly of Lemar, but the Frenchman has been tormented by injuries over the past two seasons, making his continued presence infeasible. Since he suffered an Achilles tendon rupture during a game at Valencia on Sept. 16, 2023, Lemar has played only 298 minutes across 11 appearances in two years. The club had tried to offload his salary for years, finding zero takers until Girona registered an interest in him.
Thomas Lemar, blanc-i-vermell! pic.twitter.com/6gJ1738WRJ
— Girona FC (@GironaFC) July 30, 2025
Signed from Monaco for a €72 million fee (covering 70 percent of his rights) in 2018, Lemar has more often than not struggled to justify such an expensive outlay for his services; that transfer fee is the third-largest purchase in club history, behind João Félix and Julián Alvarez.
In his best seasons, namely the 2020/21 and 2021/22 campaigns, Lemar was an important player whose agility, creativity, and dribbling skill brought the team to life in the 3-5-2 formation in which he fit so well. In those two league seasons, Lemar scored five goals and provided eight assists in 51 appearances; of course, Atlético won LaLiga in the former.
But Lemar once endured an entire season (2019/20) without a goal or an assist, and a lot of Atleti fans will maintain that Lemar’s single-finest performance for the club was his very first: the 2018 UEFA Super Cup win against Real Madrid in Tallinn, Estonia.
Then, there were the injuries: Lemar never played more than the 31 league games in which he participated during his 2018/19 debut season. He played 186 total games over seven years (one fewer than Rodrigo De Paul), averaging fewer than 27 appearances per season; even in those two aforementioned “good” years here, Lemar played 1,366 and 1,440 minutes respectively. He never crossed the 2,000-minute mark in LaLiga for Atlético.
Why am I writing in the past tense, as if Lemar’s Atlético chapter is closed? Because in all probability, Atleti will try to “pull a Saúl” with Lemar next year. The club is loaning out the player for this season, in hopes that Girona (or another club) will pay a transfer fee for him in 2026 — while a contract termination, like the one Saúl signed last week, is the other option.
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