Matthijs de Ligt Refuses to Say if He’s Joining Barcelona

If the star centre half knows where he’s going this summer he isn’t willing to say.

Is Matthijs de Ligt a lock for Barcelona or are Liverpool set to hand the Catalan giants a second embarrassing moment? Nobody watching on may know for certain, but that just means plenty of chances to write one story one day and another the next.

And based on what the player himself has come out with following the end of the Eredivisie season, we shouldn’t expect the speculation to stop and to get any certainty when it comes to the 19-year-old star centre half’s footballing future any time soon.

“We’ve just won the league,” De Ligt said following Ajax’s 4-1 victory over De Graafschap on Wednesday. “This is not the time to talk about my future. I don’t know if I’ll go with Frenkie [de Jong]. I still have to analyse things and we will see what happens.”

Ajax teammate Frenkie de Jong has already agreed a €75M Barcelona move. When pressed on the issue, De Ligt reiterated that he “cannot say anything” yet about where he might end up next season, adding that, “We will see at the end of summer.”

It remains difficult to think of De Ligt as anything but a Barcelona lock given how long he’s been linked, but the stalling and uncertainty does suggest that it might not be quite as close to a done deal as the Catalan press have often claimed this year.

Whether Liverpool are actually in the running is even harder to sort out. If they are, they’re staying tight-lipped about it, but given the way the club operates these days and that they’ve got one more game to play in their season that’s hardly a surprise.

Until the Champions League final, Liverpool won’t be doing any deals—they won’t want to risk unsettling their current players. If De Ligt’s future remains undecided as we get closer to June 1st, then they just might be serious contenders to sign him.

Source: liverpooloffside.sbnation.com