Ranking Barcelona’s 16 weirdest signings so far this millennium

When you have an academy as productive as Barcelona’s La Masia, you can generally get away with not needing to make as many weird signings as other clubs.

Barcelona has always struck us as a club that likes a challenge, though, and you can’t fault their ambition when it comes to adding players who make you think ‘Wait, what?’

This list is shorter than some of the other entries in our weird signings series – there’s no place for the high-profile youngsters who it didn’t work out for (Keirrison, Halilovic, etc), while the many like Alex Song who simply couldn’t step up to Barca’s level miss out on the basis that their signings made sense at the time.

As Barcelona began to present themselves as on the side of good versus evil, other teams and players didn’t stop in their pursuit of the other side.

Mark van Bommel is perhaps the archetype of winning ugly and vindictively, and if you were asked to come up with the anti-Barca footballer it would be him.

And yet he spent a year at Camp Nou, joining under Frank Rijkaard and even starting for the club in their victorious 2006 Champions League final. They soon realised the error of their ways, though, and binned him off as part of their ‘foulees not foulers’ approach.

Spending €4million on a 24-year-old uncapped right-back with no European experience feels like a pretty loud way of saying ‘we don’t have a big enough transfer budget’.

It’s like going to a takeaway, putting a load of coppers down on the counter and looking longingly at the server in the hopes they’ll take pity on you and give you a full meal.

Barcelona actually went unbeaten across the Brazilian’s five appearances for the club. He eventually left for Besiktas in 2019, after a loan at Sivasspor, the former home of