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Tottenham Flop Paulinho Now Barcelona Bound

Football, it’s a funny old game and that adage is never more true than today. When Gareth Bale left White Hart Lane back in 2013 it left Tottenham Hotspur with a huge pot of money, so huge they almost did not know what to do with it.

Depending on what you believe in regards to the final figure and exchange rates it is believed that Daniel Levy had something to the tune of 100 million Euro in his bank account after the sale of the Welsh wing wizard to Real Madrid, lets just say that it was not spent all that wisely.

In what was termed the magnificent seven at the time, a term you can now change to the not so magnificent seven. Tottenham bought in Christian Eriksen, Erik Lamela, Roberto Soldado, Nacer Chadli, Etienne Capoue, Vlad Chiriches and Paulinho.

Now if you were to say one of those seven players would eventually end up at Barcelona you would say that it would be Christian Eriksen. Surprisingly enough you would be wrong, oh you could not be any more wrong as it is none other than Paulinho who is making his way to the Nou Camp.

For Paulinho it is a career that has spanned Brazil, North London, China and now Catalonia, when it comes to Football quite honestly nothing is a surprise anymore. I don’t know what is more shocking Leicester winning the Premier League last season or Paulinho playing for Barcelona. I’ll let you decide.

Tottenham bought the Brazilian misfit for £17m from Corinthians back in 2013 and had to make do with a £7m loss when he was shipped onto Chinese Super League side Guangzhou Evergrande in 2015 by current boss Mauricio Pochettino.

From that point onwards you would have thought that the Brazil international would be more than happy with seeing his days out in the Far East while earning a stupendous amount of money each week, but as we know Football works in very mysterious ways.

I do not know what the Barcelona scouting department have seen in the 28 year old but it is enough to offer him a big money contract in preparation to a move to last season’s La Liga runners up. Whether it matches the money being paid to him by Guangzhou Evergrande remains to be seen but the opportunity to play for a club of this stature and return to Europe would be enough to soften the blow of any potential pay cut.

Should this move come to fruition it would come as no surprise to see him go on to have an incredible season under new manager Ernesto Valverde. It is amazing what you can do with world class players around you, I guess it is not quite the same when you are playing next to Etienne Capoue in midfield instead of potentially Andres Iniesta.

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