Gerard Pique has sparked panic at Barcelonaafter appearing to backtrack on his ‘he stays’ tweet on teammate Neymar, target of a blockbuster transfer by Paris Saint Germain.<\/p>\n
“Doubts, doubts and more doubts,” ran the headline Wednesday on the front page of Catalan daily Sport above a photo of the striker lost deep in thought.<\/p>\n
PSG are trying to lure the 25-year-old Brazilian to France and are ready to pay off his 222 million euro ($256.8 million) release clause and make the player the best-paid footballer on the planet.<\/p>\n
Last week Pique took to social media to say “he’s staying” – but when pressed on the matter Tuesday ahead of a pre-season friendly in the United States against Manchester United he was less sure of himself.<\/p>\n
“It’s a personal opinion from the conversation that I had with him and my intuition,” Pique said.
\n“But it’s not official,” he added. “And it’s not for me to say if he’s going to stay or not.”<\/p>\n
The position sent a shudder down the spine at Barcelona.<\/p>\n
“Pique retracts and feeds the uncertainty,” the newspaper Sport said.<\/p>\n
“The situation is eroding confidence at the club,” columnist Tomas Andreu wrote in Sport.<\/p>\n
“What really hurts here is the silence of the player himself, which in the end says a great deal.”<\/p>\n
Neymar departed the stadium without addressing reporters after starring in a 2-1 win over Juventus on Saturday.<\/p>\n
“They (the club) did not expect the negotiations with PSG and the player to go this far,” he said.<\/p>\n
At the same press conference, the Argentine defender Javier Mascherano said he had told Neymar to carefully weigh up the pros and cons.<\/p>\n
Mascherano added all the players, inclu<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gerard Pique has sparked panic at Barcelonaafter appearing to backtrack on his ‘he stays’ tweet on teammate Neymar, target of a blockbuster transfer by Paris Saint Germain. “Doubts, doubts and more doubts,” ran the headline Wednesday on the front page of Catalan daily Sport above a photo of the striker lost deep in thought. PSG<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5119,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[734],"class_list":{"0":"post-5118","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-neymar-psg-switch-doubts-grow-at-barcelona"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bartabangla.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}