Barcelona would 'not even consider' paying £50m for Fernando Torres

Spanish giants Barcelona have said Fernando Torres is over-priced and that they would never even consider paying £50 million for a player like Chelsea did to buy Torres from Liverpool on transfer deadline day last week.

Barcelona's spent just £2.5 million on Dutch international Ibrahim Afellay while Chelsea and Liverpool, the big bidders in the January transfer window, contributed heavily to the £135 million spent on transfer deadline day.

Barcelona's director of football, Raul Sanllehi, said at the Annual General Meeting of the European Clubs Association I was shocked by the amount spent, especially in the winter time. I felt the amount was very high. I know Barcelona would not do that sort of signing now, we would not even consider it.

Of course we have a budget, but a budget is like a blanket - if you pull it up to your chin, you need your feet to stay warm. An additional value of those signings was that Chelsea diminished one of their opponents at the same time as strengthening their own team.

So Chelsea got stronger and Liverpool got weaker, even though Liverpool won the game against them on Sunday. But in my personal opinion, Torres was over-priced.

The highest Barcelona have paid for a player was with Zlatan Ibrahimovic who they brought from Inter Milan for a player-plus-cash deal involving £40 million plus Samuel Eto in 2009. However, Ibrahimovic didn't fit in well with Barca and was sold to AC Milan a year later, as Barca spent £32 million on Valencia's David Villa.

Sanllehi admitted that the Spanish champions were short of that kind of money anymore and pointed to their £125 million shirt sponsorship deal with the Qatar Foundation as a means to balance their books.

He said, Let's not fool ourselves, we needed the money for the Qatar deal. We wouldn't have done it without a lot of money involved for sure. That's what our president said. I would understand that, the need for funds was a clear driver for the whole thing.