It's a good job Barcelona are famous, otherwise they'd look a total state in the Frenkie de Jong saga - The Warm-Up

FRIDAY'S BIG STORIES More Than A Club Ad/> We've been thinking it through, and we've decided that if the Warm-Up ever found itself dealing with existential levels of debt, such that our entire long-term existence was called into question, we too would go about our business the way Barcelona are going about theirs. That is to say: strangely, wildly, and with the blithe presumption that the universe will find a way to bend itself to our preferences. TransfersDe Jong refuses to join Man Utd, Real Madrid target Bellingham – Paper Round9 HOURS AGO Order one of your players to take a transfer he doesn't want, despite the fact you owe him €17m? Absolutely.

Bring in a 31-year-old striker to replace the 33-year-old striker you bought last January? Why not. Add a couple more defenders and another winger on top of all that. Let's have all these transfers in depending on transfers out and wage renegotiations, a chain of dominoes that might not actually exist, strung out across the continent.

And let's chuck a stadium renovation in there too, since we're keeping things exciting. The intricacies of Barcelona's finances are beyond us. They may be beyond the labs at CERN.

But the key, we're pretty confident in saying, is that this is Barcelona. That, ultimately, is the security underpinning everything: it's what's luring the players in, it's what's persuading them to lower their wages; it's what's being deployed, cudgel-like, to get Frenkie de Jong out the door with a handshake and a pocketful of IOUs. It's what's persuading the lenders to lend and the owed to defer.