Madness at Barca?
- Thread starter spids
- Start date
Marty
Audere est farce
- Mar 10, 2005
- 40,173
- 63,901
Inside Barcelona's financial woes: Champions League exit, levers, lingering Coutinho debt
Barcelona's policy of using short-term fixes to jump-start the team, means with a Champions League exit, more lever-pulling looks certain
theathletic.com
That club is still absolute haemorrhaging money. The reality is they're budgeting to lose €325m in just one single year but for these extraordinary one-off levers. What happens when you run out of levers?
There was mostly eerie silence at Camp Nou on the final whistle after Wednesday’s Champions League Group C game finished Barcelona 3-3 Inter Milan, as it dawned on fans that the Catalan side are all but certainly eliminated from the competition already.
As Inter’s players, coaches and fans celebrated in their small pockets, most of the crowd of 92,302 supporters were stunned and exhausted – as were the blaugrana team, their coach Xavi Hernandez and the club president Joan Laporta.
This was not supposed to be happening after Barca’s eventful summer 2022, with the noise of financial levers being pulled and the excitement generated by new signings like Robert Lewandowski. That was all designed to make sure that the club was ready for big nights like this with a rebuilt team which could again compete for the top trophies.
Just two months into the 2022-23 season that theory is looking very shaky indeed. Barca’s new team began the season impressively in La Liga, with Lewandowski scoring goals and most of the other new signings appearing to settle quickly.
The last few weeks had brought back-to-back UCL group defeats to Bayern Munich and Inter Milan. But Barca had told themselves that they had been unlucky in both games, and on Wednesday they could turn things back in their favour.
90 minutes of huge excitement and chaos later, it was clear that Laporta’s plan through the summer to mortgage the club’s future to become instantly competitive had not worked.
Barring a miracle over the remaining two group games, Xavi’s team are headed again for the Europa League, and further financial problems and drama are now all but certain.
The possibility of such a disaster was not being talked about at all last Sunday at the club’s AGM held at the Auditori 1899 hall by Camp Nou. Laporta said that “together we have saved Barca”, reminding everyone of how the club had been almost bankrupt when he replaced Josep Maria Bartomeu as president in March 2021.
The charismatic club president again explained how using various financial levers to borrow from the future would create a ‘virtuous circle’, in which the club will be boosted to success on and off the pitch and a winning team will grow its revenues so much that paying off the loans will not be difficult.
The delegates present on behalf of almost 150,000 ‘socio’ members definitely seemed to agree, as all the votes put forward by the board were carried with huge majorities.
The vote on the club’s 2021-22 accounts, which showed a surplus of €98 million due to the inclusion of €267 million raised by selling 10% of future La Liga TV rights to Sixth Street, was carried easily with 548 in favour, 43 against, and 24 blank.
The 2022-23 budget, predicted to show profits after taxes of €275 million due to the inclusion of €600m million from three other levers, was also voted through by a huge margin – 478 delegates for, 35 against and 15 blank.
There were also votes on the details of the Sixth Street TV rights arrangement, and the creation of a new company to be called Barca Digital Entertainment, to manage the club’s crypto and NFT plans, along with partners Socios.com and Jaume Roures’ Orpheus Media. Both carried easily with the backing of around 90% of delegate socios.
Even during the questions from the floor at the AGM, there were few doubts about where the club was headed. The message was again that the levers mean that Barca are back – their finances are better and the team is competitive again.
A more realistic summation of Barca’s finances came when the club’s financial vice-president Eduardo Romeu admitted last week that “without the income from the ‘levers’, last year we would have lost €106 million, and this year (the loss would be) €210m.”
That was a reminder that Barca are still living beyond their means and still paying off the mistakes of the past. Most obviously, their squad still costs way more than it should. In 2021-22 the total spent on salaries and amortised transfer fees was €518 million, but the budget confirms that in 2022-23 it is up by 27% to €656 million, after the signings of Lewandowski, Raphinha and five more new players last summer.
Short-term fixes from past seasons keep coming back to cause problems. A big one is salaries to players deferred from past seasons which are now due. The focus last week was again on Frenkie De Jong, Marc Andre ter Stegen and the three ‘captains’ Sergio Busquets, Gerard Pique and Jordi Alba, who all cost the club more than €40m a year at the moment. Of these only Ter Stegen has started the season well, while the current level of veterans Busquets and Pique was to be cruelly highlighted against Inter.
The accounts published last week also show that Barca still owe transfer fees dating back years, including for players who are no longer at the club like Philippe Coutinho, Miralem Pjanic and Neto Moura. €108m of this total is due to be paid for these players during 2022-2023.
The AGM also brought a focus on the efforts of the Barca board to increase the clubs ‘non-lever’ revenues. The predicted budget for this season predicts commercial and sponsorship income of €369m, 38% above last year’s €267m and also well above 2019-20’s €324m, when Lionel Messi was still at the club.
The energy and enthusiasm raised by last summer’s transfer business has seen Camp Nou attendances rise significantly during the first two months of 2022-23. Last season’s average stadium attendance was 55,026, which was down from 76,747 in the last full campaign before COVID-19. The average across the first four La Liga games and the opening UCL group game against Viktoria Plzen was 81,890 – a 19% increase or 13,199 spectators more each game.
This has been trumpeted as evidence that the virtuous circle was already working. In particular, that the money spent to bring in a proven star like Lewandowski last summer was a good investment. His arrival was widely celebrated even as Spanish radio station Cadena Ser reported that the club has committed to pay him about €100 million in total over the next four seasons, going well past his 37th birthday.
All that seemed too far away to be worrying about when Lewandowski began the season with 12 goals in his first eight Barca games. But the risks involved should have been clearer when the Poland international drew blanks against both Bayern Munich and Inter Milan in UCL weeks two and three, as the team lost both games, with other summer signings Raphinha and Marcos Alonso not impressing either. But still, nobody at last week’s AGM was seriously considering they could end up back in the Europa League after Christmas.
“Last season the impact of being eliminated in the Champions League groups was €12 million,” Romeu said last week. “We were counting on income we didn’t get, but we also saved costs. This year, we are aiming to win La Liga and reach the Champions League quarter-finals.”
That projection will almost certainly not be reached now, and €12m is a very conservative estimate of how much another group stage elimination will cost. And, even had they made the UCL last eight, their audiovisual revenue was still predicted to fall by 6% this year to €236m. Because from this season they have already started to pay Sixth Street 25% of their La Liga TV income, or €41m per year. A sign that, whether or not the levers actually pay off, they will have to be paid back.
Beyond the bare numbers of TV revenue, making the Champions League knock-out stages is also vital to the club’s image. The virtuous circle idea depends on keeping the enthusiasm going, growing their fanbase and increasing their revenues from commercial partners. Which was why nobody at the AGM wanted to even think about Wednesday’s game against Inter going badly.
“We know we cannot function forever based on levers,” said Laporta at the AGM, although he soon added that “we have to respond to demands for immediate results as soon as possible.” As usual, Romeu was clearer. “If we do not do something, with the current structure we will lose €200m each year,” he said.
That ‘doing something’ is pretty clearly continuing to try and move more high-earning players off the payroll. The 2022-23 budget has a provision for €85m being raised from elsewhere, with profit on player trading the most obvious route. “We have to accelerate the exits or eliminate the contracts which are still above market rate,” said Jaume Guardiola, the president of the club’s economic commission, at the AGM.
Barca have already received a blow on this, with Atletico Madrid’s brinkmanship over making the Antoine Griezmann loan into a permanent deal meaning that Barca’s hierarchy eventually accepted around €20m rather than the €40m which had initially been agreed. They would love to sell De Jong if that were possible, and other players could be pushed out in January or next summer.
Romeu suggested last week that it will be 2024-25 before Barca’s situation is “normalised”, and said that a squad cost including salaries and amortised fees of around €500m at that point would be “ideal to have a competitive team”. By that stage Busquets, Alba and Pique will be gone, although the team’s younger core of Pedri, Ronald Araujo, Gavi and Ansu Fati will be reaching a stage of their career where they will require significant salaries to keep them happy. Lewandowski will, for that season, be due €32m gross, when he is 36 years old.
Before even getting to 2024-25, it was clear from the talk at and around the AGM that more levers will be activated along the way. The board already have permission from socios to sell a 49% stake in the club’s BLM (Barça Licensing & Merchandising) arm, although they have not yet been able to find a suitable partner willing to pay what they want. “We are looking for an industry partner but we have said we will not do any operation for less than €300 million euros,” Romeu said.
Another potential lever would be selling a share in the club’s museum, which is among the most visited tourist attractions in the Catalan capital. Laporta’s ally Roures has already flagged he might be interested in paying upfront for a stake in the museum’s future revenues. But this is complicated by the huge renovation project at Camp Nou, which will see the museum need to be closed for a significant amount of time over the next couple of years.
That Espai Barca project has also added to Barca’s liabilities, with €1.5 billion euros to repaid over 25 years once the new stadium is completed. In the short term, it will cost them €50m next season as construction work means the first team must play at the city’s smaller and less modern Estadi Montjuic during the 2023-24 campaign.
The AGM also brought talk of another apparently magic solution that Laporta still hopes can save their future – the European Super League project. He used his speech on Sunday to call the Super League “the solution that football needs” and a “necessity” for Barca. Barca, Madrid and Juventus are currently involved in a legal battle against UEFA in the European Union’s court system, but the possibility of a Super League bringing hundreds of millions of euros to turn Barca’s finances around any time soon remains very low.
There was a reminder of those political battles when UEFA’s champions League anthem was whistled as usual at Camp Nou before Wednesday’s game against Inter. What was to follow was a rough reminder that suggesting such clever financial fixes is generally easier than putting together a good team that can win football matches.
Xavi was clear at the pre-game news conference on Tuesday. “This is a final for us,” the former playmaker said. There was definitely a do-or-die feeling around the stadium the following night, with firecrackers and drumming outside, and an official attendance of 92,302, the biggest crowd since before the pandemic.
Nerves grew through the first half as Lewandowski had a header cleared off the line and Raphinha missed a simple chance at the back post. But five minutes before the break it was 1-0 Barca as Dembele arrived just on time to smash home from close range. The roar from the crows was one of joy mixed with relief and betrayed the fear the fans had been feeling.
That should really have settled everything down, but it did not. Awful defending from Pique allowed Nicolo Barella to equalise. There was shock on and off the pitch as Lautaro Martinez rifled in for 2-1 to the visitors. Lewandowski’s deflected shot made it 2-2, but by now, Barca were a wobbly mess, Xavi’s frantic substitutions left them without a right-back, and Inter’s Robin Gosens took advantage. Lewandowski showed his worth with a fantastic header to make it 3-3 but Barca needed Ter Stegen to make two fine saves to avoid a defeat which would have confirmed their exit.
As it is they now need a miracle – if Inter beat Viktoria Plzen in a fortnight, even a victory against Bayern Munich will not save them from elimination and the Europa League again.
“This Champions League has been cruel for us, since Munich and Milan,” said Xavi afterwards, ruing his team’s luck in the competition so far. Club captain Busquets called this game “chaos” on Spanish TV, having been one of the many players overcome during the mayhem on the pitch.
The whole club, from the president to the fans, were not ready for this. It was not supposed to happen – they had followed the plan, and really believed that “Barca were back”, as Laporta has repeated so often. But they are clearly not.
Exit in the UCL groups this season will be a far worse embarrassment than last year, when Barca could argue that they were still reeling from Messi’s exit, and Ronald Koeman was clearly struggling as coach. The whole point of pulling all the levers last summer, gambling by borrowing from their future, was to make sure it could not happen again. Virtuous circles of the type Laporta is aiming for are not set in motion in the Europa League.
The performances against Bayern and Inter raise the question whether the players the board signed last summer, often through Laporta’s personal connections, were the right ones for the team. Others at the club are wondering whether Xavi is the right coach to get the most out of the talented squad the board worked so hard to assemble for him.
The evidence suggests that the drama at Barca is not over yet. Wednesday’s game was a huge blow for the club’s self-esteem and its future prospects on and off the pitch.
With Laporta having committed so publicly and forcefully to the policy using short-term fixes to jump-start the team, more lever-pulling looks almost certain now.
Whether that is really good for the club long term or not is moot, Barca are in too far to pull out now.
As Inter’s players, coaches and fans celebrated in their small pockets, most of the crowd of 92,302 supporters were stunned and exhausted – as were the blaugrana team, their coach Xavi Hernandez and the club president Joan Laporta.
This was not supposed to be happening after Barca’s eventful summer 2022, with the noise of financial levers being pulled and the excitement generated by new signings like Robert Lewandowski. That was all designed to make sure that the club was ready for big nights like this with a rebuilt team which could again compete for the top trophies.
Just two months into the 2022-23 season that theory is looking very shaky indeed. Barca’s new team began the season impressively in La Liga, with Lewandowski scoring goals and most of the other new signings appearing to settle quickly.
The last few weeks had brought back-to-back UCL group defeats to Bayern Munich and Inter Milan. But Barca had told themselves that they had been unlucky in both games, and on Wednesday they could turn things back in their favour.
90 minutes of huge excitement and chaos later, it was clear that Laporta’s plan through the summer to mortgage the club’s future to become instantly competitive had not worked.
Barring a miracle over the remaining two group games, Xavi’s team are headed again for the Europa League, and further financial problems and drama are now all but certain.
The possibility of such a disaster was not being talked about at all last Sunday at the club’s AGM held at the Auditori 1899 hall by Camp Nou. Laporta said that “together we have saved Barca”, reminding everyone of how the club had been almost bankrupt when he replaced Josep Maria Bartomeu as president in March 2021.
The charismatic club president again explained how using various financial levers to borrow from the future would create a ‘virtuous circle’, in which the club will be boosted to success on and off the pitch and a winning team will grow its revenues so much that paying off the loans will not be difficult.
The delegates present on behalf of almost 150,000 ‘socio’ members definitely seemed to agree, as all the votes put forward by the board were carried with huge majorities.
The vote on the club’s 2021-22 accounts, which showed a surplus of €98 million due to the inclusion of €267 million raised by selling 10% of future La Liga TV rights to Sixth Street, was carried easily with 548 in favour, 43 against, and 24 blank.
The 2022-23 budget, predicted to show profits after taxes of €275 million due to the inclusion of €600m million from three other levers, was also voted through by a huge margin – 478 delegates for, 35 against and 15 blank.
There were also votes on the details of the Sixth Street TV rights arrangement, and the creation of a new company to be called Barca Digital Entertainment, to manage the club’s crypto and NFT plans, along with partners Socios.com and Jaume Roures’ Orpheus Media. Both carried easily with the backing of around 90% of delegate socios.
Even during the questions from the floor at the AGM, there were few doubts about where the club was headed. The message was again that the levers mean that Barca are back – their finances are better and the team is competitive again.
A more realistic summation of Barca’s finances came when the club’s financial vice-president Eduardo Romeu admitted last week that “without the income from the ‘levers’, last year we would have lost €106 million, and this year (the loss would be) €210m.”
That was a reminder that Barca are still living beyond their means and still paying off the mistakes of the past. Most obviously, their squad still costs way more than it should. In 2021-22 the total spent on salaries and amortised transfer fees was €518 million, but the budget confirms that in 2022-23 it is up by 27% to €656 million, after the signings of Lewandowski, Raphinha and five more new players last summer.
Short-term fixes from past seasons keep coming back to cause problems. A big one is salaries to players deferred from past seasons which are now due. The focus last week was again on Frenkie De Jong, Marc Andre ter Stegen and the three ‘captains’ Sergio Busquets, Gerard Pique and Jordi Alba, who all cost the club more than €40m a year at the moment. Of these only Ter Stegen has started the season well, while the current level of veterans Busquets and Pique was to be cruelly highlighted against Inter.
The accounts published last week also show that Barca still owe transfer fees dating back years, including for players who are no longer at the club like Philippe Coutinho, Miralem Pjanic and Neto Moura. €108m of this total is due to be paid for these players during 2022-2023.
The AGM also brought a focus on the efforts of the Barca board to increase the clubs ‘non-lever’ revenues. The predicted budget for this season predicts commercial and sponsorship income of €369m, 38% above last year’s €267m and also well above 2019-20’s €324m, when Lionel Messi was still at the club.
The energy and enthusiasm raised by last summer’s transfer business has seen Camp Nou attendances rise significantly during the first two months of 2022-23. Last season’s average stadium attendance was 55,026, which was down from 76,747 in the last full campaign before COVID-19. The average across the first four La Liga games and the opening UCL group game against Viktoria Plzen was 81,890 – a 19% increase or 13,199 spectators more each game.
This has been trumpeted as evidence that the virtuous circle was already working. In particular, that the money spent to bring in a proven star like Lewandowski last summer was a good investment. His arrival was widely celebrated even as Spanish radio station Cadena Ser reported that the club has committed to pay him about €100 million in total over the next four seasons, going well past his 37th birthday.
All that seemed too far away to be worrying about when Lewandowski began the season with 12 goals in his first eight Barca games. But the risks involved should have been clearer when the Poland international drew blanks against both Bayern Munich and Inter Milan in UCL weeks two and three, as the team lost both games, with other summer signings Raphinha and Marcos Alonso not impressing either. But still, nobody at last week’s AGM was seriously considering they could end up back in the Europa League after Christmas.
“Last season the impact of being eliminated in the Champions League groups was €12 million,” Romeu said last week. “We were counting on income we didn’t get, but we also saved costs. This year, we are aiming to win La Liga and reach the Champions League quarter-finals.”
That projection will almost certainly not be reached now, and €12m is a very conservative estimate of how much another group stage elimination will cost. And, even had they made the UCL last eight, their audiovisual revenue was still predicted to fall by 6% this year to €236m. Because from this season they have already started to pay Sixth Street 25% of their La Liga TV income, or €41m per year. A sign that, whether or not the levers actually pay off, they will have to be paid back.
Beyond the bare numbers of TV revenue, making the Champions League knock-out stages is also vital to the club’s image. The virtuous circle idea depends on keeping the enthusiasm going, growing their fanbase and increasing their revenues from commercial partners. Which was why nobody at the AGM wanted to even think about Wednesday’s game against Inter going badly.
“We know we cannot function forever based on levers,” said Laporta at the AGM, although he soon added that “we have to respond to demands for immediate results as soon as possible.” As usual, Romeu was clearer. “If we do not do something, with the current structure we will lose €200m each year,” he said.
That ‘doing something’ is pretty clearly continuing to try and move more high-earning players off the payroll. The 2022-23 budget has a provision for €85m being raised from elsewhere, with profit on player trading the most obvious route. “We have to accelerate the exits or eliminate the contracts which are still above market rate,” said Jaume Guardiola, the president of the club’s economic commission, at the AGM.
Barca have already received a blow on this, with Atletico Madrid’s brinkmanship over making the Antoine Griezmann loan into a permanent deal meaning that Barca’s hierarchy eventually accepted around €20m rather than the €40m which had initially been agreed. They would love to sell De Jong if that were possible, and other players could be pushed out in January or next summer.
Romeu suggested last week that it will be 2024-25 before Barca’s situation is “normalised”, and said that a squad cost including salaries and amortised fees of around €500m at that point would be “ideal to have a competitive team”. By that stage Busquets, Alba and Pique will be gone, although the team’s younger core of Pedri, Ronald Araujo, Gavi and Ansu Fati will be reaching a stage of their career where they will require significant salaries to keep them happy. Lewandowski will, for that season, be due €32m gross, when he is 36 years old.
Before even getting to 2024-25, it was clear from the talk at and around the AGM that more levers will be activated along the way. The board already have permission from socios to sell a 49% stake in the club’s BLM (Barça Licensing & Merchandising) arm, although they have not yet been able to find a suitable partner willing to pay what they want. “We are looking for an industry partner but we have said we will not do any operation for less than €300 million euros,” Romeu said.
Another potential lever would be selling a share in the club’s museum, which is among the most visited tourist attractions in the Catalan capital. Laporta’s ally Roures has already flagged he might be interested in paying upfront for a stake in the museum’s future revenues. But this is complicated by the huge renovation project at Camp Nou, which will see the museum need to be closed for a significant amount of time over the next couple of years.
That Espai Barca project has also added to Barca’s liabilities, with €1.5 billion euros to repaid over 25 years once the new stadium is completed. In the short term, it will cost them €50m next season as construction work means the first team must play at the city’s smaller and less modern Estadi Montjuic during the 2023-24 campaign.
The AGM also brought talk of another apparently magic solution that Laporta still hopes can save their future – the European Super League project. He used his speech on Sunday to call the Super League “the solution that football needs” and a “necessity” for Barca. Barca, Madrid and Juventus are currently involved in a legal battle against UEFA in the European Union’s court system, but the possibility of a Super League bringing hundreds of millions of euros to turn Barca’s finances around any time soon remains very low.
There was a reminder of those political battles when UEFA’s champions League anthem was whistled as usual at Camp Nou before Wednesday’s game against Inter. What was to follow was a rough reminder that suggesting such clever financial fixes is generally easier than putting together a good team that can win football matches.
Xavi was clear at the pre-game news conference on Tuesday. “This is a final for us,” the former playmaker said. There was definitely a do-or-die feeling around the stadium the following night, with firecrackers and drumming outside, and an official attendance of 92,302, the biggest crowd since before the pandemic.
Nerves grew through the first half as Lewandowski had a header cleared off the line and Raphinha missed a simple chance at the back post. But five minutes before the break it was 1-0 Barca as Dembele arrived just on time to smash home from close range. The roar from the crows was one of joy mixed with relief and betrayed the fear the fans had been feeling.
That should really have settled everything down, but it did not. Awful defending from Pique allowed Nicolo Barella to equalise. There was shock on and off the pitch as Lautaro Martinez rifled in for 2-1 to the visitors. Lewandowski’s deflected shot made it 2-2, but by now, Barca were a wobbly mess, Xavi’s frantic substitutions left them without a right-back, and Inter’s Robin Gosens took advantage. Lewandowski showed his worth with a fantastic header to make it 3-3 but Barca needed Ter Stegen to make two fine saves to avoid a defeat which would have confirmed their exit.
As it is they now need a miracle – if Inter beat Viktoria Plzen in a fortnight, even a victory against Bayern Munich will not save them from elimination and the Europa League again.
“This Champions League has been cruel for us, since Munich and Milan,” said Xavi afterwards, ruing his team’s luck in the competition so far. Club captain Busquets called this game “chaos” on Spanish TV, having been one of the many players overcome during the mayhem on the pitch.
The whole club, from the president to the fans, were not ready for this. It was not supposed to happen – they had followed the plan, and really believed that “Barca were back”, as Laporta has repeated so often. But they are clearly not.
Exit in the UCL groups this season will be a far worse embarrassment than last year, when Barca could argue that they were still reeling from Messi’s exit, and Ronald Koeman was clearly struggling as coach. The whole point of pulling all the levers last summer, gambling by borrowing from their future, was to make sure it could not happen again. Virtuous circles of the type Laporta is aiming for are not set in motion in the Europa League.
The performances against Bayern and Inter raise the question whether the players the board signed last summer, often through Laporta’s personal connections, were the right ones for the team. Others at the club are wondering whether Xavi is the right coach to get the most out of the talented squad the board worked so hard to assemble for him.
The evidence suggests that the drama at Barca is not over yet. Wednesday’s game was a huge blow for the club’s self-esteem and its future prospects on and off the pitch.
With Laporta having committed so publicly and forcefully to the policy using short-term fixes to jump-start the team, more lever-pulling looks almost certain now.
Whether that is really good for the club long term or not is moot, Barca are in too far to pull out now.
TheChosenOne
A dislike or neg rep = fat fingers
- Dec 13, 2005
- 48,100
- 50,105
Inside Barcelona's financial woes: Champions League exit, levers, lingering Coutinho debt
Barcelona's policy of using short-term fixes to jump-start the team, means with a Champions League exit, more lever-pulling looks certain
That club is still absolute haemorrhaging money. The reality is they're budgeting to lose €325m in just one single year but for these extraordinary one-off levers. What happens when you run out of levers?
There was mostly eerie silence at Camp Nou on the final whistle after Wednesday’s Champions League Group C game finished Barcelona 3-3 Inter Milan, as it dawned on fans that the Catalan side are all but certainly eliminated from the competition already.
As Inter’s players, coaches and fans celebrated in their small pockets, most of the crowd of 92,302 supporters were stunned and exhausted – as were the blaugrana team, their coach Xavi Hernandez and the club president Joan Laporta.
This was not supposed to be happening after Barca’s eventful summer 2022, with the noise of financial levers being pulled and the excitement generated by new signings like Robert Lewandowski. That was all designed to make sure that the club was ready for big nights like this with a rebuilt team which could again compete for the top trophies.
Just two months into the 2022-23 season that theory is looking very shaky indeed. Barca’s new team began the season impressively in La Liga, with Lewandowski scoring goals and most of the other new signings appearing to settle quickly.
The last few weeks had brought back-to-back UCL group defeats to Bayern Munich and Inter Milan. But Barca had told themselves that they had been unlucky in both games, and on Wednesday they could turn things back in their favour.
90 minutes of huge excitement and chaos later, it was clear that Laporta’s plan through the summer to mortgage the club’s future to become instantly competitive had not worked.
Barring a miracle over the remaining two group games, Xavi’s team are headed again for the Europa League, and further financial problems and drama are now all but certain.
The possibility of such a disaster was not being talked about at all last Sunday at the club’s AGM held at the Auditori 1899 hall by Camp Nou. Laporta said that “together we have saved Barca”, reminding everyone of how the club had been almost bankrupt when he replaced Josep Maria Bartomeu as president in March 2021.
The charismatic club president again explained how using various financial levers to borrow from the future would create a ‘virtuous circle’, in which the club will be boosted to success on and off the pitch and a winning team will grow its revenues so much that paying off the loans will not be difficult.
The delegates present on behalf of almost 150,000 ‘socio’ members definitely seemed to agree, as all the votes put forward by the board were carried with huge majorities.
The vote on the club’s 2021-22 accounts, which showed a surplus of €98 million due to the inclusion of €267 million raised by selling 10% of future La Liga TV rights to Sixth Street, was carried easily with 548 in favour, 43 against, and 24 blank.
The 2022-23 budget, predicted to show profits after taxes of €275 million due to the inclusion of €600m million from three other levers, was also voted through by a huge margin – 478 delegates for, 35 against and 15 blank.
There were also votes on the details of the Sixth Street TV rights arrangement, and the creation of a new company to be called Barca Digital Entertainment, to manage the club’s crypto and NFT plans, along with partners Socios.com and Jaume Roures’ Orpheus Media. Both carried easily with the backing of around 90% of delegate socios.
Even during the questions from the floor at the AGM, there were few doubts about where the club was headed. The message was again that the levers mean that Barca are back – their finances are better and the team is competitive again.
A more realistic summation of Barca’s finances came when the club’s financial vice-president Eduardo Romeu admitted last week that “without the income from the ‘levers’, last year we would have lost €106 million, and this year (the loss would be) €210m.”
That was a reminder that Barca are still living beyond their means and still paying off the mistakes of the past. Most obviously, their squad still costs way more than it should. In 2021-22 the total spent on salaries and amortised transfer fees was €518 million, but the budget confirms that in 2022-23 it is up by 27% to €656 million, after the signings of Lewandowski, Raphinha and five more new players last summer.
Short-term fixes from past seasons keep coming back to cause problems. A big one is salaries to players deferred from past seasons which are now due. The focus last week was again on Frenkie De Jong, Marc Andre ter Stegen and the three ‘captains’ Sergio Busquets, Gerard Pique and Jordi Alba, who all cost the club more than €40m a year at the moment. Of these only Ter Stegen has started the season well, while the current level of veterans Busquets and Pique was to be cruelly highlighted against Inter.
The accounts published last week also show that Barca still owe transfer fees dating back years, including for players who are no longer at the club like Philippe Coutinho, Miralem Pjanic and Neto Moura. €108m of this total is due to be paid for these players during 2022-2023.
The AGM also brought a focus on the efforts of the Barca board to increase the clubs ‘non-lever’ revenues. The predicted budget for this season predicts commercial and sponsorship income of €369m, 38% above last year’s €267m and also well above 2019-20’s €324m, when Lionel Messi was still at the club.
The energy and enthusiasm raised by last summer’s transfer business has seen Camp Nou attendances rise significantly during the first two months of 2022-23. Last season’s average stadium attendance was 55,026, which was down from 76,747 in the last full campaign before COVID-19. The average across the first four La Liga games and the opening UCL group game against Viktoria Plzen was 81,890 – a 19% increase or 13,199 spectators more each game.
This has been trumpeted as evidence that the virtuous circle was already working. In particular, that the money spent to bring in a proven star like Lewandowski last summer was a good investment. His arrival was widely celebrated even as Spanish radio station Cadena Ser reported that the club has committed to pay him about €100 million in total over the next four seasons, going well past his 37th birthday.
All that seemed too far away to be worrying about when Lewandowski began the season with 12 goals in his first eight Barca games. But the risks involved should have been clearer when the Poland international drew blanks against both Bayern Munich and Inter Milan in UCL weeks two and three, as the team lost both games, with other summer signings Raphinha and Marcos Alonso not impressing either. But still, nobody at last week’s AGM was seriously considering they could end up back in the Europa League after Christmas.
“Last season the impact of being eliminated in the Champions League groups was €12 million,” Romeu said last week. “We were counting on income we didn’t get, but we also saved costs. This year, we are aiming to win La Liga and reach the Champions League quarter-finals.”
That projection will almost certainly not be reached now, and €12m is a very conservative estimate of how much another group stage elimination will cost. And, even had they made the UCL last eight, their audiovisual revenue was still predicted to fall by 6% this year to €236m. Because from this season they have already started to pay Sixth Street 25% of their La Liga TV income, or €41m per year. A sign that, whether or not the levers actually pay off, they will have to be paid back.
Beyond the bare numbers of TV revenue, making the Champions League knock-out stages is also vital to the club’s image. The virtuous circle idea depends on keeping the enthusiasm going, growing their fanbase and increasing their revenues from commercial partners. Which was why nobody at the AGM wanted to even think about Wednesday’s game against Inter going badly.
“We know we cannot function forever based on levers,” said Laporta at the AGM, although he soon added that “we have to respond to demands for immediate results as soon as possible.” As usual, Romeu was clearer. “If we do not do something, with the current structure we will lose €200m each year,” he said.
That ‘doing something’ is pretty clearly continuing to try and move more high-earning players off the payroll. The 2022-23 budget has a provision for €85m being raised from elsewhere, with profit on player trading the most obvious route. “We have to accelerate the exits or eliminate the contracts which are still above market rate,” said Jaume Guardiola, the president of the club’s economic commission, at the AGM.
Barca have already received a blow on this, with Atletico Madrid’s brinkmanship over making the Antoine Griezmann loan into a permanent deal meaning that Barca’s hierarchy eventually accepted around €20m rather than the €40m which had initially been agreed. They would love to sell De Jong if that were possible, and other players could be pushed out in January or next summer.
Romeu suggested last week that it will be 2024-25 before Barca’s situation is “normalised”, and said that a squad cost including salaries and amortised fees of around €500m at that point would be “ideal to have a competitive team”. By that stage Busquets, Alba and Pique will be gone, although the team’s younger core of Pedri, Ronald Araujo, Gavi and Ansu Fati will be reaching a stage of their career where they will require significant salaries to keep them happy. Lewandowski will, for that season, be due €32m gross, when he is 36 years old.
Before even getting to 2024-25, it was clear from the talk at and around the AGM that more levers will be activated along the way. The board already have permission from socios to sell a 49% stake in the club’s BLM (Barça Licensing & Merchandising) arm, although they have not yet been able to find a suitable partner willing to pay what they want. “We are looking for an industry partner but we have said we will not do any operation for less than €300 million euros,” Romeu said.
Another potential lever would be selling a share in the club’s museum, which is among the most visited tourist attractions in the Catalan capital. Laporta’s ally Roures has already flagged he might be interested in paying upfront for a stake in the museum’s future revenues. But this is complicated by the huge renovation project at Camp Nou, which will see the museum need to be closed for a significant amount of time over the next couple of years.
That Espai Barca project has also added to Barca’s liabilities, with €1.5 billion euros to repaid over 25 years once the new stadium is completed. In the short term, it will cost them €50m next season as construction work means the first team must play at the city’s smaller and less modern Estadi Montjuic during the 2023-24 campaign.
The AGM also brought talk of another apparently magic solution that Laporta still hopes can save their future – the European Super League project. He used his speech on Sunday to call the Super League “the solution that football needs” and a “necessity” for Barca. Barca, Madrid and Juventus are currently involved in a legal battle against UEFA in the European Union’s court system, but the possibility of a Super League bringing hundreds of millions of euros to turn Barca’s finances around any time soon remains very low.
There was a reminder of those political battles when UEFA’s champions League anthem was whistled as usual at Camp Nou before Wednesday’s game against Inter. What was to follow was a rough reminder that suggesting such clever financial fixes is generally easier than putting together a good team that can win football matches.
Xavi was clear at the pre-game news conference on Tuesday. “This is a final for us,” the former playmaker said. There was definitely a do-or-die feeling around the stadium the following night, with firecrackers and drumming outside, and an official attendance of 92,302, the biggest crowd since before the pandemic.
Nerves grew through the first half as Lewandowski had a header cleared off the line and Raphinha missed a simple chance at the back post. But five minutes before the break it was 1-0 Barca as Dembele arrived just on time to smash home from close range. The roar from the crows was one of joy mixed with relief and betrayed the fear the fans had been feeling.
That should really have settled everything down, but it did not. Awful defending from Pique allowed Nicolo Barella to equalise. There was shock on and off the pitch as Lautaro Martinez rifled in for 2-1 to the visitors. Lewandowski’s deflected shot made it 2-2, but by now, Barca were a wobbly mess, Xavi’s frantic substitutions left them without a right-back, and Inter’s Robin Gosens took advantage. Lewandowski showed his worth with a fantastic header to make it 3-3 but Barca needed Ter Stegen to make two fine saves to avoid a defeat which would have confirmed their exit.
As it is they now need a miracle – if Inter beat Viktoria Plzen in a fortnight, even a victory against Bayern Munich will not save them from elimination and the Europa League again.
“This Champions League has been cruel for us, since Munich and Milan,” said Xavi afterwards, ruing his team’s luck in the competition so far. Club captain Busquets called this game “chaos” on Spanish TV, having been one of the many players overcome during the mayhem on the pitch.
The whole club, from the president to the fans, were not ready for this. It was not supposed to happen – they had followed the plan, and really believed that “Barca were back”, as Laporta has repeated so often. But they are clearly not.
Exit in the UCL groups this season will be a far worse embarrassment than last year, when Barca could argue that they were still reeling from Messi’s exit, and Ronald Koeman was clearly struggling as coach. The whole point of pulling all the levers last summer, gambling by borrowing from their future, was to make sure it could not happen again. Virtuous circles of the type Laporta is aiming for are not set in motion in the Europa League.
The performances against Bayern and Inter raise the question whether the players the board signed last summer, often through Laporta’s personal connections, were the right ones for the team. Others at the club are wondering whether Xavi is the right coach to get the most out of the talented squad the board worked so hard to assemble for him.
The evidence suggests that the drama at Barca is not over yet. Wednesday’s game was a huge blow for the club’s self-esteem and its future prospects on and off the pitch.
With Laporta having committed so publicly and forcefully to the policy using short-term fixes to jump-start the team, more lever-pulling looks almost certain now.
Whether that is really good for the club long term or not is moot, Barca are in too far to pull out now.
What a mess.
agrdavidsfan
Ledley's Knee!
- Aug 25, 2005
- 10,918
- 13,352
Problem is they don’t really have the talent coming through from La Masia at the moment either!
friends a huge Barcelona fan and there was a suggestion that they may have be forced to going full catalunyan for the next few years with a max of 1-2 foreign players.
looks as if Pedri and Gavi along with the left back may have to be scarified the young lad plus Stegen also being made available which is madness
friends a huge Barcelona fan and there was a suggestion that they may have be forced to going full catalunyan for the next few years with a max of 1-2 foreign players.
looks as if Pedri and Gavi along with the left back may have to be scarified the young lad plus Stegen also being made available which is madness
Insomnia
Twisted Firestarter
- Jan 18, 2006
- 20,209
- 55,574
Farcalona
aliyid
Well-Known Member
- Dec 28, 2004
- 7,006
- 20,134
Nothing against Barca normally but I want them to fail as a message to everyone that this reckless approach won’t work.
What kind of message does it send that you can be rewarded just for having the name Barcelona. Success is a privilege that should be earned not just bought by the highest bidder (yes I know it’s working everywhere else)
What kind of message does it send that you can be rewarded just for having the name Barcelona. Success is a privilege that should be earned not just bought by the highest bidder (yes I know it’s working everywhere else)
Spurslove
Well-Known Member
- Jul 6, 2012
- 6,627
- 9,281
It's so fucking sad. Seems not so long ago I was watching the likes of Xavi, Iniesta, Pique, Messi, Suarez and Neymar really tearing it up over there. One season, between all three strikers, they scored 122 goals. Messi was the greatest footballer I've ever seen. One calendar year, he scored 73 goals. Just think about that. They used to inspire me. I used to look forward to seeing them play every week on Sky or BT Sport. They gave me back the real love of football I'd lost watching the ordinary, boring football of the English Premiership. Iniesta was just magical and his midfield partner, Xavi was a genius.
That was then, this is now. The club is fucked and it's so bloody sad.
Yiddo100
Well-Known Member
- Jan 16, 2019
- 9,918
- 52,111
Is that La Masia going full catalunyan you mean?
Spurslove
Well-Known Member
- Jul 6, 2012
- 6,627
- 9,281
I read somewhere that we were looking at Ter Stegen as a successor to Hugo. Could be a great move if true.
Dougal
Staff
- Jun 4, 2004
- 60,370
- 130,272
- Staff
- #251
Barca years ago - we don’t cheapen our shirt with a sponsor.
Barca later - we donate space on our shirt to Unicef
Barca now - https://barcauniversal.com/official...-with-drakes-ovo-branding-for-el-clasico/amp/
Says it all.
Barca later - we donate space on our shirt to Unicef
Barca now - https://barcauniversal.com/official...-with-drakes-ovo-branding-for-el-clasico/amp/
Says it all.
JeremyPaxton
Willing to play manager roulette
- May 29, 2019
- 405
- 1,436
It’s not even running out of “levers” to pull, it what “levers” mean - each one is diminishing the future revenues of the club *permanently* in order to fund operating losses today. they need those revenues to grow in order to keep the cash amount that goes to the club the same… it’s like standing on an iceberg in warm water, betting that the currents will take you back to colder waters. It’s beyond risky
Japhet
Well-Known Member
- Aug 30, 2010
- 19,277
- 57,638
I don't have much sympathy for Barca tbh, but it's a great shame that Real Madrid, who have been repeatedly bailed out as a result of their financial recklessness, will be rubbing their hands at their demise. We should try to sign Lenglet in January if they're in that much trouble in my opinion.
VegasII
Well-Known Member
- May 14, 2008
- 9,750
- 16,670
cider spurs
Well-Known Member
- Jul 5, 2016
- 9,401
- 23,735
carmeldevil
Well-Known Member
- May 15, 2018
- 7,667
- 45,873
How Real Madrid and Barcelona became the same team
Real Madrid was always the flashy, big spending team while Barcelona preached young talent and development. Now, in 2022, these two eternal rivals -- who meet Sunday, 10:15 a.m. ET, ESPN+ -- have become variations of the same thing.
www.espn.com
Good article here
Similar threads
