Messi983
Senior Member
Selling Digne was the right decision for all sides. Not replacing him last summmer was wrong.
I also think we sold him for a fair price (somewhere close to his market value at the time; the same for Gomes this year) given he was just a backup who we got for cheap and he wanted to leave. Now how well he has developed playing regularly is mostly Everton's credit. He wouldn't have the same season if he would stay here in a backup role playing every 5th game (though it would still be better to have him than nobody last season as Alba's backup) and maybe not if he would be sold to another team where he wouldn't fit in as well as he did in Everton.
Our problem is that we are usually selling at fair prices while most of other clubs are selling at inflated prices (like they should on current market) and we are only buying at those prices. Big clubs will usually always overpay when buying from smaller clubs and on the other hand they will often sell under price when selling their reject to them. In "pre-Neymar era" Barça usually paid 150-200% more than players real value (and this was something normal for other big clubs as well) and sold our rejects for 50-70% of what we should. Now sometimes we need to pay 3-4 times more while we are still selling at pre-inflation prices.
Obviously we got really good value out of some of our signing over the last years like MATS, Umtiti or Raki and most recently eventhough he wasn't cheap we probably also spared 20-30M by securing FDJ in January. So it's not really everything as bad as most people think on the buying part of our transfers. But when it comes to selling we should learn to do much better if we want to "survive" and stay competitive.
