Posts like this always make me chuckle, as if when we go to buy a big name CB in January the person at that club is going to think, "Well Guardiola said they weren't going to buy so I guess they're not desperate, better make sure we keep them at the negotiating table!".
You're buying a CB in January, everyone knows you're desperate. Not to mention none of these clubs want to sell a top quality CB mid-season, if you try and play hard ball over price, they'll just put the phone down and laugh, grateful they've got a legitimate excuse to give to the player who wanted to move why the deal fell through.
We've seen this so many times, with Walker, Mendy, KDB - long protracted "negotiations" that end up with us paying 99% of the original price. It's not that Txiki is a bad negotiator, it's that these deals are much more transactional than they used to be.