Raphinha’s Barcelona were for the romantics but romance is transactional nowadays

Raphinha seems set for Barcelona, a club whose recent behaviour in recent years has undone a considerable amount of goodwill.

So, it looks as though Raphinha will after all be a Barcelona player next season. Latest reports indicate that Leeds United have accepted an initial offer of $49m (€58m), to increase to around €69m with the inevitable add-ons. It has seemed pretty clear since the end of last season that Camp Nou would be the player’s preferred destination despite ongoing interest from both Chelsea and Arsenal. Ultimately, even though we might assume that the selling club has the final say on whether he goes or not, it is the player who holds the cards in such a situation, even if – as in this case – what they’re holding isn’t an incredible hand.

There was room for Leeds to bite back over this, should they have wished to prove a point. Raphinha is, of course, a Brazil international and there is a World Cup to be played at the end of this year. Under normal circumstances, for Brazilian players these few months before a major tournament would be a period during which only the World Cup matters. Brazil do, after all, place greater sporting and cultural merit upon playing for the national team than they do for any club. Raphinha needs match time, and Leeds might easily have refused whatever Barcelona offered and forced him to sit on the substitutes bench until (at least) the January transfer window, had they been so minded. It would have been a colossal waste of money. They chose not to use that mutually assured destruction level of leverage.

For now, meanwhile, Raphinha leads a somewhat lonely existence. The Leeds United squad have already left for Australia for their pre-season cash cow, but the player set to leave the club didn’t travel with them. Instead, he was posting photographs of himself training on his own at Leeds’ Thorp Arch training facility on Instagram and receiving numerous welcome messages from supporters of the club that he hasn’t actually formally signed for yet.

Leeds themselves are just moving on. Luis Sinisterra has joined from Feyenoord, and the club has now spent £95m on new players this summer, all covered by the sale of Kalvin Phillips and – presuming he actually goes and that Barcelona actually pony up the money rather than trying to take Leeds to court to try and prove that actually Leeds should be paying Barcelona for the honour of taking him off their hands – Raphinha.

Leeds are taking the…