Atletico Madrid's Viral Fax Mocking Barcelona's Alvarez Chase

Bad Bunny tickets.
An ABC subscription.
A bag of sunflower seeds.

The going rate, according to Atletico Madrid, for Lamine Yamal.

As Barcelona push to land Julian Alvarez, Atletico chose mockery over silence, launching a sharp, very public dig at their La Liga rivals and the noise around the Argentine forward’s future.

Reports from BBC Sport columnist Guillem Balague say Barcelona have opened talks and already have an agreement in place with the 26-year-old. Barca are expected to table a 90m euro (£77.9m) offer. Atletico, though, are widely expected to reject it.

On Friday night, the Madrid club answered the transfer chatter not with a statement, but with a stunt.

“We have sent a fax…”

Atletico’s social media team rolled out their first punchline: an “official” offer for 18-year-old Spain star Lamine Yamal.

“We have sent a fax to FC Barcelona with our transfer offer: 4 tickets for tomorrow's Bad Bunny concert, an annual subscription to ABC, and a bag of sunflower seeds. We eagerly await the response to prepare the ‘announce’,” the club posted.

No dry legalese. No “club communication”. Just a pointed parody of the kind of bids and briefings that often swirl around big-name targets.

And they were only getting started.

Pedri, Raphinha… and “Tom Ford and Smith”

The jokes kept coming, each one wrapped in AI-generated images of Barcelona players wearing Atletico shirts.

For Spain midfielder Pedri, the offer was upgraded: six tickets for Sunday’s Bad Bunny concert at the club’s Riyadh Air Metropolitano Stadium. The venue itself became part of the gag, the club essentially bartering access to its own showpiece event.

Then came Brazil winger Raphinha.

Atletico proposed “loan for a season and in exchange we loan out Tom Ford and Smith with no option to buy” – a deliberate nod to a memorable slip from club president Enrique Cerezo earlier this year, when he mistakenly named “Tom Ford and Smith” as Atletico players.

They signed it off with a flourish: “An offer impossible to refuse.”

The humour was clear, but so was the target: the narrative around Barcelona’s pursuit of Alvarez and what Atletico see as a “smear campaign” attached to it.

A rare public roasting between giants

Across just over an hour, Atletico fired out a flurry of posts, each more brazen than the last. The response was instant.

The content surged into more than 55 million X feeds, an extraordinary reach even in an era of hyperactive club accounts and meme culture. Supporters and neutrals shared, quote-tweeted and dissected every line.

What made it cut through was not only the creativity but the context. It is highly unusual for a major European club to go so openly satirical, and so directly at a rival, on a public platform. Clubs often lean on coded messages, cryptic emojis, or carefully worded communiqués.

Atletico chose something else: open mockery, dressed up as transfer business.

Barcelona, busy chasing Alvarez, suddenly found themselves cast as the punchline. Atletico, who look set to turn down the 90m-euro bid, turned a tense, high-stakes negotiation into a viral theatre piece.

In a league where the power battle has long been fought on the pitch and in the boardroom, Atletico just reminded everyone there is a third front now: the timeline. And they’ve shown they’re more than willing to fight there too.