Barcelona president Joan Laporta has admitted that he did want to bring Lautaro Martinez to the club in the summer after missing out on Julian Alvarez.
Lautaro has been regularly linked with Barcelona over the years and this summer was no exception. However, once again Inter made it clear their striker was going nowhere.
Laporta has now explained what happened after he made contact with the Italian side to ask about the Argentina international.
“I’ll tell you how it went. One day I called Beppe Marotta
on the phone: me and him, without intermediaries,” he told the Corriere della Sera.
“I told him that I would like to have Lautaro in my team and that I admired the boy so much. But he didn’t even let me finish talking. He told me clearly that the player was not for sale. And that he would not be the one to decide whether to move or not.
“And so I stopped all the reasoning, there was no way to continue. There is a relationship of mutual trust between me and Marotta, we have not gone any further out of respect for him and Inter.”
Barcelona ended up switching Raphinha to the No. 9 position and bringing in Gabriel Jesus from Arsenal in a late move before the summer window closed.
