"We were interested in Miranchuk, but we had Pedri and Gavi"

Barcelona were looking to strengthen their midfield years ago, before their young stars arrived. When they signed Pedri from Las Palmas, as well as getting another academy player in, the Barcelona club already had this position covered, but they were wanting to go for more.

Eric Abidal, who in 2020 was part of the Barcelona board and one of their roles was the recruitment of players for the first team as well as for the reserves. In his time, the Frenchman looked at a midfielder who was at Lokomotiv Moscow: Aleksei Miranchuk.

The ex-board member spoke to 'Sport24' about the interest in the Russian footballer: "We were really interested, we travelled to Moscow and we saw him with Lokomotiv, we even spoke with the Medical Department".

But it didn't go any further, because Abidal explained that they were going to have too many players in midfielder as two youngsters were coming through. "Miranchuk is intelligent and technically very talented, we wanted him at Barca, but we soon realised that we had that sort of player in the academy with Pedri and Gavi", he said.