He met with the player’s father and told him that “the ideal team for him” was Barça
Former FC Barcelona president Sandro Rosell assured this Friday that he agreed to sign striker Neymar da Silva shortly before the end of his contract with Santos FC and a year earlier than expected because the then club coach Tito Vilanova requested it, who died in 2014.
Rosell has decided to answer only the questions of the prosecutor and the defenses when testifying as a defendant in the trial for the ‘Neymar 2 case’, in which he is accused of alleged fraud and corruption between individuals in the signing of the player and faces a request for five years in prison.
“Why was 17 million paid? Well, almost because he caught us on the right foot, because his thing was to wait six and pay zero. But we listened to the coach”, Rosell said when explaining why they signed the striker shortly before will be free of rights.
He has detailed that Tito Vilanova asked him to advance the signing of Neymar (which was scheduled for 2014 but was done in 2013) when he went to visit him in New York, where he was undergoing medical treatment for the cancer he was suffering from.
“We decided to comply with the will of our coach, who unfortunately could never train him afterwards” and later, when the also accused and former club president Josep Maria Bartomeu declared, he said that he was also in the conversation with Vilanova.
In 2011, Barça signed a contract with Neymar to ensure his signing in 2014, in which they lent him 10 million as a signing bonus and guaranteed him 40 million more when the transfer was made.
Regarding what his participation was in the negotiation of the signing of Neymar, he explained that he was continuously informed and “set the economic limit” that could be offered for the transfer, and he denied that Bartomeu participated in the negotiations.
“Everything that comes after legal work, well no, we had a very large department, many advisers” who were in charge of the legal aspects of the contracts.
When asked if he personally intervened on occasion, he explained that he once met in Miami with Neymar’s father, who is also his representative, to assure him of the club’s interest in the player: “I told him that because of the way he played his son, the ideal team for him, to make the leap to Europe, was Barça”.
