Barcelona came close reaching a player exchange deal with Juventus: the La Liga heavyweights will send right-back Nelson Semedo to the Serie A leading team in exchange for Miralem Pjanic, Mattia De Sciglio and cash, according to Daily Mail.

Barcelona have been interested in Pianic for a while. Juventus at first wanted Arthur Melo but Melo wanted to stay at the Camp Nou so the Old Lady accepted Semedo instead. According to Sport, Semedo is negotiating his contract terms with Juventus and, once they reach an agreement, the exchange will happen.

In the past few months, Barcelona have been reaching out to a lot of teams and made similar player exchange offers to land their target players. Paris Saint-Germain (Neymar), Inter Milan (Lautaro Martinez) both received calls.

One of the major reasons behind Barcelona's above behavior has been lack of funding. The arms race in Europe in recent years cost the club quite a fortune but none of the players they bought were able to help Barcelona in a fast, effective way like Luis Suarez - and that transfer happened almost six years ago.

However, having been low in pocket, Barcelona could not afford to spend as freely as usual. That's also why their top office kept releasing reports about how much they wanted bring Neymar back to the Camp Nou but could not even make a suitable offer.

In the transfer negotiations over Martinez, Inter made it very clear: they could let the Argentine genius go but only after Barcelona pays 110 million euros to trigger the release clause in his contract. Meanwhile, Martinez did not want to force his way out of Inter. That left Barcelona only one choice: to raise more funding.

More similar deals are expected.