‘From the Beginning’—Barcelona Summer Signing Hits Back at Uncertain Future

Roony Bardghji remains adamant that he will be allowed to play for Barcelona’s first-team this season, as has been the plan from the beginning, despite considerable doubts as to how that promise will be fulfilled.

In what has become an unwanted annual tradition, Barcelona spent much of the summer fretting over not which players to buy, but how they would be able to ensure that those new signings were actually allowed to play for the club.

After some typical creative accounting and an ugly public spat with club captain Marc-André ter Stegen, the Catalan giants found room within the squad’s strict salary limits to register both Marcus Rashford and Joan García. There was eventually space made for Gerard Martín and Wojciech Szczeşny, yet the future of Roony Bardghji is still mired in uncertainty.

The €2 million ($2.4 million) recruit from FC Copenhagen still hasn’t been registered with the first-team. There was the expectation that the 19-year-old would be included in the squad for Barcelona Atlétic, the club’s B team which was relegated to the fourth tier of Spanish soccer last season. But the club announced their roster for the 2025–26 campaign on Thursday without Roony included.

Roony Bardghji joined Barcelona over the summer. | X/Barcelona

In fact, an official statement claimed that the teenager would “be in the first-team dynamic” and wear No. 21. Yet, at the time writing, Roony remains absent from La Liga’s official squad list and is therefore ineligible to play in Spain’s top flight. Hansi Flick did include the summer recruit in Barcelona’s Champions League squad, but he would still have to be registered by the club domestically before competing in Europe.

Roony, for his part, is adamant that he will play for the senior side this season. “I don’t think I would have signed for Barcelona if it was about playing for the youth team,” he told reporters after being called up for Sweden’s U21s. “I’ve played over 100 games for an A team and I wouldn’t have accepted going to a B team. That’s something they made up. It’s not true.”

What is true is that Barcelona are running out of ways to legally get Roony on the pitch. After his surprise absence from the B team squad list, it appears as though the board will have to personally endorse his arrival by putting their own wealth at risk. This was the approach used to force through Rashford’s inclusion for the first game of the league season.

“From the beginning, both the club and I knew the plan was to be in the first-team,” Roony shrugged. “Of everything that’s been said, none of it is true. It hasn’t affected me because they’ve had problems registering players in the past.”