da leao： Barcelona may have picked up some quality players last summer but the club has become synonymous with dreadful deals in recent years.

da apostaganha： Barcelona appear to be getting back on track. After club president Joan Laporta desperately pulled economic levers left, right and centre last summer in order to fund summer signings, the Catalans won a first Liga title since 2019.

Barca, though, only found themselves in a dire financial position because of the reckless spending of the previous regime. Indeed, the Blaugrana became synonymous with dreadful deals under Laporta's predecessor, Josep Maria Bartomeu, who left the club on the verge of bankruptcy.

So, who ranks as the worst transfer in the club's history? As GOAL outlines below, there are plenty of contenders for that particularly dubious honour…

Getty16Malcom

Perhaps the only saving grace to Malcom's Camp Nou career is that Barcelona didn't make much of a loss on his sale.

The Blaugrana signed him in 2018 for €41m (£36m/$43m) and, even at the time, that felt like a lot of money.

Firstly, Malcom appeared a bit unnecessary, considering he was naturally a right winger and had a certain Lionel Messi blocking his path into the first team.

Then, there was the fact that he was hardly one of the hottest names on the transfer market. The Brazilian had been at Bordeaux for the previous three seasons but had only really impressed during his final year in France.

It didn't come of much of a surprise, then, to see him struggle in Spain. He made just 24 appearances and scored only four times, though one of his goals was an important equaliser the drawn first leg of the Copa Del Rey semi-final victory over Real Madrid.

Malcom was eventually sold to Zenit Saint Petersburg for €40m (£35m/$42m) – a generous sum for a player who failed to make the grade at Barca but later went on to score the winning goal for Brazil in the 2020 Olympics.

"I left [Barcelona] with a cool head," he later told , "because I did a good job." Many Blaugrana fans would beg to differ…

AdvertisementGetty15Emmanuel Petit

Emmanuel Petit wanted out of Barcelona after just six months.

He later revealed that when he arrived from Arsenal in the summer of 2000, the Blaugrana were imploding.

"There was a war in the dressing room between the Catalan and Dutch players," he told RMC Sport. "We also had [Lorenzo] Serra Ferrer as a coach and he didn't have enough strength or necessary charisma to manage the team."

Petit also claimed that Serra Ferrer had no idea what position he played, resulting in the midfielder being regularly deployed as a centre-back.

Regardless of who was to blame, Petit ended up looking nothing like the player that had excelled in the Premier League.

The World Cup winner, thus, went to club president Joan Gaspart in January 2001 and asked to be put on the transfer list. He was eventually sold to Chelsea at the end of his one and only season at Barca.

Getty14Nelson Semedo

The one good thing we can say about Nelson Semedo's stint at Barcelona is that at least the club managed to recoup all of the money they wasted on him.

The Portuguese was viewed as a long-term replacement for Dani Alves, with Semedo having made quite the name for himself as an attacking full-back at Benfica.

Indeed, Barca agreed to pay an initial €30m (£27.5m/$30m) for his services, with the potential for a further €5m (£4.4m/$5m) in add-ons.

Semedo, though, with his total lack of defensive skills, proved a liability throughout his time at Camp Nou, culminating in him being humiliated by Alphonso Davies in Barca's shocking 8-2 loss to Bayern Munich in the quarter-finals of the 2019-20 Champions League.

The Portuguese connection aside, it remains difficult to understand why Wolves felt compelled to take Semedo off Barca's hands in September 2020.

Getty13Christophe Dugarry

After flopping at AC Milan, Christophe Dugarry joined Barcelona in the summer of 1997 in the hope of getting his career back on track ahead of a World Cup on home soil.

However, he would spend the next six months wondering what on earth he was doing at Camp Nou.

"It was surreal," the Frenchman later told SFR Sport of his time playing under Louis van Gaal.

"The worst thing was when I went to his office to ask to leave. I had to leave at any cost, and what's more, [the then France coach Aime] Jacquet had said we had to be first-choice at our clubs on the first day of 1998. I pretended to cry, saying 'I can't take anymore, I have to leave.'

"And he just looked at me and said: 'No, you can't leave. I believe in you.'

"What? You believe in me and you make me play as a defensive midfielder? It was a horrible six months. I went through hell."

However, after making just seven appearances for Barca, Dugarry was allowed to move to Marseille in January 1998 and went on to help France win the World Cup that very summer.