Barcelona: Martin Braithwaite's 2020 unveiling was hilariously poor

Barcelona’s signing of Martin Braithwaite from Leganes in 2020 was unexpected and completed under controversial circumstances.

La Liga granted the club an emergency exception to trigger Braithwaite’s release clause and sign him in February 2020, outside of the transfer window, citing a long-term injury to Ousmane Dembele as the need to do so.

It’s decisions like this that make it not so surprising to see the state of financial strain Barcelona have found themselves in in 2022, as they scramble to clear the decks for new signings and try to raise funds from anywhere possible.

For too long now, the club have spent money aimlessly in the transfer market and not felt the benefit from doing so, which resulted in them not being able to sign Lionel Messi to a new contract in 2021, no matter how hard they tried.

Barcelona are still signing players, though, and finding ways to bolster their squad for the coming season. Robert Lewandowski is currently the latest name to head to the Camp Nou and has followed Raphinha, Franck Kessie and Andreas Christensen in doing so this summer.

As ever, players have been presented to the fans in grand unveilings. Raphinha got the chance to say hello to his new crowd and showed off some skills in the process, just like Braithwaite did following his controversial transfer in 2020.

The trope of the player unveiling is an intriguing subject, though. And while it’s pretty cool when it works, it can very easily go wrong. For Braithwaite, it very quickly went hideously wrong.

Attempting to show off a few tricks and skills to win over onlookers, considering he was hardly thought of as a Barcelona calibre forward, the Denmark international completely butchered his showboating session, and it was equally