Txiki: "It's difficult for Barça to sell players"

Speaking at a press conference, Barcelona sports director Txiki Begiristain looked back at the summer transfer window.




The squad
"Having a shorter squad is not a risk. You can have a larger squad but then you have the problem of managing all that and that carries some risks too. I don't see a problem compared with next season.

The exit of Jorquera won't have an effect because we just return to the situation of having two goalkeepers at the first team. Chygrynskiy will have more minutes than Cáceres. The minutes of Hleb will be for Pedro. And both Jonathan and Tiago could take advantage of the sale of Gudjohnsen. Maxwell will probably play more than Sylvinho and Ibrahimovic replaces Eto'o. And the club also hopes that Milito will have recovered soon.

It's true that Pep has said that the squad is rather short but he has also said that he has a lot of confidence in the youth players, who adapt easily to the way of playing. We have played with a lot of home-grown players in last season's Champions League final, we ended the Super Cup in Monaco with eight home-grown players on the pitch and during the pre-season we have seen that there are talented youth players coming through. We are starting the season with a good and secure feeling, and we are very satified with the current squad."

The winter tranfer window
"Although we don't really like the winter market, we will be monitoring things over the coming months since we haven't been able to do everything we wanted this summer because of the very high and actually shocking prices."

Robinho
"We have a great relationship with Manchester City and during the talks the name of Robinho came up. We didn't make a concrete bid because every time we talked about it, they made clear that he was not for sale."

Selling players
"It's difficult for Barça to get money for the players we sell. We basically sell because we don't want the player anymore. We don't need them anymore and the other teams of course know that too. The salary is one of the other problems when selling players. In any case, we don't want to be the best sellers. Our first objective is to buy players and to improve what we already have."