#3 Could he cope with the pressure?
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If Griezmann decides to move away from Atletico, the likelihood is that it’d take a world-record transfer fee – eclipsing the monstrous £89m paid by Manchester United for Paul Pogba last season – to prise him away from the Vicente Calderon. The fee could well end up being close to £100m, which is a scary figure however you look at it.
The question I’m pondering over is whether Griezmann could cope with such pressure. He’s been in high-pressure situations before, admittedly – the weight of a whole country partially on his back during Euro 2016 – and he has largely delivered, but being the world’s most expensive player is a whole other ball game. Just ask Pogba, who’s received plenty of criticism this season and has generally struggled to live up to the price tag.
Historically too, players with the “most expensive of all time” tag have often found it hard going – Gianluigi Lentini and Denilson wore the tag like a millstone around their necks – while other huge transfers such as Manchester United’s 2003 signing of Juan Sebastian Veron also went wildly wrong with the player never justifying the money spent on him.
A move costing a world-record fee would put insane amounts of pressure on Griezmann and the only thing that could justify it would be to hit the ground running and score a ton of goals. It wouldn’t be easy.
