Newcastle United have made an offer for former Leeds United winger Raphinha but Barcelona are demanding more, according to reports in Spain.
The Magpies could be faced with a challenging summer in the transfer market as they look to keep up their ambitions of being one of the best teams in Europe while looking to avoid falling foul of the financial rules.
and the Magpies, who are determined to hang on to their biggest names, will have to negotiate a balancing act as they go about the latest phase of their recruitment drive.
Will Newcastle have to sell star players this summer?
Newcastle CEO Darren Eales admitted earlier this year that the Magpies could have to sell some of their star players to reinvest back into the squad.
Eales said: On any player, at any time, it depends on circumstances. It s difficult to hypothesis but, if we re offered £1bn for one of those players, then no-one could argue against that making sense.
Any decision we make will always be against the backdrop of the medium to long-term benefit for the club. It s difficult to say specifically on certain players, but I can say that, if we re going to get to where we want to get to, at times it is necessary to trade your players.
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Whether that is because of the contract length of the player in question, the offer is too good to refuse, you need to reload in certain areas, but all of this could make sense to trade that player. It is counter-intuitive and part of the inherent system of PSR that there is an incentive to trade your players if you want to re-invest, by the nature of the boundaries.
When asked if under Premier League s Profit and Sustainability Rules every player has a price, Eales said: Yes.
Eales added: If you are churning players you create more headroom. We have seen lots of examples of this elsewhere. [Philippe] Coutinho at Liverpool and they brought in Allison and Virgil Van Dijk. [Jack] Grealish going from Aston Villa and they have reinvested and reloaded.
Decan Rice at West Ham, it s just the nature of the beast. If you trade players on it creates more headroom . You have to keep growing that headroom, increasing commercial revenue and player trading.
Any sales will also mean replacements with Spanish publication Nacional insisting that Newcastle have already made an offer of €40m (£35m) for Barcelona winger Raphinha.
And they could be in luck with Barcelona president Joan Laporta totally for a player who believes that he has not made the merits to have his continuity guaranteed .
Newcastle are totally convinced that he will be able to recover his best version if he moved back to the Premier League but Laporta thinks their opening bid is a totally insufficient proposal .
Instead, the Barcelona president requests €60m, which is the same amount they bought him off Leeds for in 2022, as he wants to correct the mistake of signing him .
