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The original was posted on /r/soccer by /u/Vila-real on 2025-06-24 04:04:28+00:00.
The 2020/21 Europa League is a core memory of most soccer fans who follow the sport. A small team called Villarreal, out of the smaller-in-proportion town of 50,000 that is Vila-real (different spelling) beat Manchester United on penalties (11-10). Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s side, loyal to what would be the second out of three Europa League finals exactly four years apart (2016/17, 2020/21, and 2024/25), bent the knee and sent the Groguets (Yellows in Valenciano dialect) into the title-winning stratosphere for the first time–ever.
The Yellow Submarine netted roughly 26m Euros that season for lifting the trophy, which for a club with a budget of 117m Euro in the 20/21 season, was a notable accomplishment.
Regardless of trophies, Villarreal has been doing its homework to bring the money in; and it had very little to do with competition revenue. The club has been collecting an average of 16m Euros per season, solely on the purchasing and selling of strikers. Five strikers to be exact.
That amount is equivalent to winning the Europa League five times, with an extra 11 million to spend.
Villarreal’s strategy was not always this fine tuned. If we travel to the Mediterranean club’s first season in La Liga, the 1998/99 year, things were quite different: free transfers like recent Real Sociedad manager Imanol Alguacil or penalty-specialist Manolo Alfaro signed for the club; young prospects like Valencia icon David Albelda and goalscoring goalkeeper Andreu Palop joined on loan.
The club splashed in two superstars: Argentine attacking midfielder Walter Gaitan for 4.5 million, an absolute fortune for Villarreal back then, and 30-year-old Gica Craioveanu, a Romanian striker who, after a lukewarm season at Real Sociedad, became an unexpected icon for Villarreal, scoring 13 goals in their debut season in La Liga.
That included a brace in the 1-3 away win to then-player Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona at the Camp Nou, which prompted a sea of white handkerchiefs by the local fans, the Spaniards way of saying “We want you out.”
Van Gaal, eight in La Liga at that moment, did not last much longer. However, neither did Villarreal record signing Walter Gaitan, who did not score or assist in La Liga, and returned home by season’s end. Gica Craioveanu lasted four more years and left to Getafe on a free transfer.
25 years later, Villarreal has chiseled down to a science its ability to purchase strikers who are either promising, down on their luck or unseen, and focusing on expecting performance, then turning them around, while still young and in their prime, for a huge profit.
This is hardly a surprising strategy, albeit one difficult to master. As part of soccer’s ecosystem, some clubs are bound to understand that titles, like the one the club lifted in 2021, don’t come every year. If that is understood, the next step is coming to terms with the fact that young players who excel at clubs which don’t lift silverware may want to make the jump to clubs which do.
Villarreal understands this, and furthermore, uses it as a very powerful weapon: join the club. If you perform, this is an optimal place to be seen.
This roadmap has been used for players who excelled at Villarreal in arguably every position, and their corresponding clubs that saw them: Pepe Reina at Liverpool, Diego Lopez at Real Madrid, and Belletti at Barcelona; Unai Emery taking hometown kid Pau Torres to Aston Villa, or Eric Bailly joining Mourinho at Manchester United.
Ballon d’Or winner and now Manchester City player Rodri spent several years in Villarreal’s youth system, attending the UJI university of Castellon, before Atletico put 20m Euro down to then turn the midfielder over to Pep Guardiola a season later.
The same team, still under Simeone’s command, is about to splash close to 50 million Euros for Alex Baena, arguably the best player at the club over the past four seasons, by the end of the month.
Villarreal knows how to find investments and capitalize on them, both on the field, then after; However, when it comes to strikers, the club is excelling at it like few do.Over the past ten years, and looking at the main five strikers sold, the numbers are worth studying.
The situations were different in each of the cases above, but the common thread was the ability to buy on the cheap, expect performance soon thereafter, and have an understanding with the player that, if an offer were to come close to the high-but-affordable transfer clause, it would be in the best interest of both player and club to accept it.
There were those who were performing and wanted to step up their careers like Bakambu, undervalued in Turkey and, at age 26, averaging a goal every two matches; or Norwegian target striker Sorloth, who scored double-digit seasons in Denmark, Turkey and lastly for Real Sociedad before getting the call.
There were products of the scouting of young talents, like the case of Nicolas Jackson, who at age 16 quit school against his parents’ wishes, featured for six months in a local club in Senegal, and was extended an offer to join Villarreal’s youth system. Luciano Vietto showed excellent promise for Argentinean club Racing Club by the time The Yellow Submarine signed him at age 20. Then there was everlasting talent Pato, from the thunderous goal against Barcelona 20 seconds from kick off in the Champions League, to bouncing from Italy, to Brazil, to England, until he landed in Vila-real for a meager three million Euro.
Six months later, he was in China, and Villarreal had cleared 15 million.
In looking at these five strikers purchased over the past ten years, Villarreal spent 26 million Euro. These five players netted 157 goals and assists in 293 matches, and, never spending more than two and a half seasons at the club, left a whopping 141 million Euros on their way out.
Villarreal received 26m Euro for lifting the Europa League trophy in Gdansk in 2021; 141 million would be the equivalent to five more of them. 5.42 more, technically. This way of working extends to owner Fernando Roig’s entire family empire, from Mercadona, a well known grocery chain in Spain, to Pamesa, an equally successful ceramic tile company.
“The main goal” he told Relevo in 2023 “is to not lose money.” Player-signing decisions made outside of the traditional transfer market follow the same reasoning. Yeremy Pino, the explosive winger from the Canary Islands and Spanish international, arrived at a very young age, giving him years to acclimate to a new region of Spain, and a new way of working before ever featuring for the first team.
Alex Baena, an outstanding performer in Marcelino’s 4-4-2, has averaged two assists every four matches for two consecutive seasons, highest average in La Liga, with Nico Williams and Lamine Yamal in the podium behind him (La Liga stats via FBref, 2024).
He joined the youth system at age 12.
The signing of players nobody else seems to be able to recognize, combined with an unapologetic drive to bring young players from all over the country into the first team is a method that works, over and over, for Villarreal; and one that fans from more renowned teams, like Atletico, wish they’d see more of.
Enter Thierno Barry.
The 21-year-old Frenchmen, who on Wednesday will feature against Germany for a spot in the Euro U21 final, has excelled in his first season at Vila-real: 11 goals in La Liga, and a perfect combination to Ayoze’s 19 goal record season. Beyond helping secure a spot in the flashy newly formatted Champions League for Villarreal, Barry’s performance has caught the eye of the Premier League, always willing to make a splash in the transfer market if a striker of the characteristics of Thierno appears: raw power, good in the air, and with the ability to score, assist, and improve.
The latter is crucial in Villarreal’s transfer strategy: Barry has plenty of room for improvement; clubs looking at his first touch or his general ability to associate with others in the attack may shrug and sign the striker anyway, understanding that a potential 100m Euro player is in their ranks.
On the other hand, plenty of reasons to get excited about his performance so far: he finished top scorer with Beveren in Belgium in the 2023/24 exercise, and even though he is one of the strikers in La Liga with the least touches on the ball per match, less than five per 90, he finished in the Top 10 for most non-penalty scorers. He is also in the top 10 of the competition for most aerial duels won, four per 90 minutes (La Liga stats via FBref, 2024).
That last stat, as well as how often he is used to carry the ball from defensive and into attacking situations, is one of the key reasons the transfer ecosystem believes that Thierno Barry would be a perfect fit in an Everton team aching for a striker. Apparently the Toffees believe so as well, as plenty of reports over the past two weeks point at a potential offer making, eventually, its way to Vila-real.
The transfer clause is one specifically tailored to Villarreal…
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