Diego Simeone has revealed Atletico Madrid failed to re-sign Diego Costa because there was no ‘buyout clause’ in the striker’s contract.
Costa joined Chelsea in 2014 and helped them to win the Premier League title under Jose Mourinho but failed to repeat his debut heroics in his second season as the Blues struggled under the Portuguese, which sparked speculations that he wanted to return to Atletico.
Explaining how the transfer went down, Simeone told Marca: ‘I was crystal clear with Diego about what we were trying to do and how long we’d wait for an answer and that’s why we’ve still got a great relationship today,
‘The problem we came up against was that there tend not to be buyout clauses in England and so Chelsea could say to us: ‘we want £180m’ or ‘we don’t want to sell’.
‘From my point of view both I and the club did everything we possibly could to get him back to Atletico but what happened was we set a date after which we had to take action and we signed Kevin Gameiro instead.’
