Barcelona’s latest plan to fix their finances – the one where caterers help sell the metaverse
Barcelona and money worries. If only they had a euro for every time this was discussed.
The questions for this transfer window might sound familiar — how much do Barca have to spend? Who might they need to sell? Can they actually register any new signings in La Liga?
Here, we look at the full story behind the club’s economic struggles, taking in the recent history while bringing you up to date, as well as explaining the bigger picture to understand a far-fetched but important development: Barcelona’s catering providers are stepping in to provide an immediate cash injection by signing up as new partners in a project related to “Web3, NFTs and the metaverse”.
There’s a lot more to this. Let’s dive in.
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Why are Barca in financial trouble?
Barcelona’s financial problems go back to the previous presidency of Josep Maria Bartomeu when the club paid huge player salaries and transfer fees it could not afford.
Bartomeu’s presidency saw Lionel Messi earning an annual pre-tax salary of more than €100million (£86m; $109m at current rates). Large sums were spent on players whose performances did not match their prices, such as Philippe Coutinho, Ousmane Dembele and Antoine Griezmann.
Ex-Barcelona president Josep Maria Bartomeu (Pedro Salado/Quality Sport Images/Getty Images)
No matchday revenues when the Covid-19 pandemic closed the Camp Nou for a year was a further blow, and by the time Bartomeu was forced out in October 2020, the club’s debts had reached €1.35billion.
How have they dealt with this?
President Joan Laporta and other club figures have often spoken about the tough decisions and cuts they say were necessary to save the club from bankruptcy and protect its member-owned status — the most painful of all being telling Messi in the summer of 2022 that they could not afford to keep him.
Laporta’s big idea for sorting the club’s finances has been pulling financial ‘levers’, which involve the sale of ‘assets’ such as future TV revenues and parts of the club’s business activities. This has raised more than €800million, which allowed for the refinancing of many of the loans inherited from Bartomeu.
The current board also borrowed €1.5billion in April 2023 to finally start renovating the Camp Nou, which was badly needed following years of neglect. That means playing at least 18 months at the smaller Montjuic stadium, leading to an estimated €150million loss in matchday revenue.
Yet the club has continued to spend?
Since Messi left, Barca have signed international stars including Robert Lewandowski, Ferran Torres, Raphinha, Jules Kounde, Ilkay Gundogan and Vitor Roque. This summer, Dani Olmo is about to join from RB Leipzig in a deal worth €60million.
That has meant — not counting the ‘levers’ money or the Camp Nou rebuild loans — cumulative losses of almost €1billion over the past three financial years in the club’s annual accounts.
Olmo was a key player in Spain’s Euro 2024 success (Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
Victor Font, who lost to Laporta in the 2021 presidential elections, told The Athletic this summer that the board’s policies had not fixed the club’s economic issues at all.
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“Barca’s financial situation is worse now than when Laporta came in,” Font said. “We’ve bigger debts, fewer assets, and we’re still not generating profits to pay off the debt and protect our socio model. Bartomeu ‘kicked the can’ so far that the current board had to deal with it. Now they’re doing the same, smacking the can as far as possible.”
Has La Liga responded?
La Liga has strict financial rules designed to ensure that all clubs live within their means, including a salary limit set for each team at the start of each season, which is calculated according to revenue. Clubs that breach this limit cannot officially register any new players within their squads until they deal with the deficit from previous years.
The competition body responded to Barca’s first summer of lever pulling by tweaking its rules in November 2022, so that one-off ‘lever’ money could not be counted during salary limit calculations.
La Liga president Javier Tebas (Oscar J Barroso / AFP7 via Getty Images)
In the summer of 2023, La Liga lowered Barca’s official permitted salary limit from €648million in 2022-23 to a new figure of just €270m. In February, that was cut even further, to €204m, when Barca’s real squad cost for 2023-24, the total of salaries and transfer amortisations, was officially budgeted at €492m.
So, Barca are hugely over their salary limit for last season — and they need to fix problems in their accounts caused by the levers to bring their 2024-25 limit back up to a level that fits the contracts of their current players.
Which players aren’t registered with La Liga?
Two members of Barca’s squad, 33-year-old centre-back Inigo Martinez and 19-year-old forward Vitor Roque, are not registered with the Spanish top flight for the new season.
Martinez joined Barca on a free transfer last summer but only the first half of his two-year contract was registered with La Liga 12 months ago.
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Roque arrived for an initial €30million in January — but the deal to sign him could cost Barca more than double that (€61m) if potential add-ons are fulfilled. He was eligible to play over the second half of 2023-24 as an emergency replacement for Gavi, who was injured.
Vitor Roque was signed in a deal that could be worth €61m (Mateo Villalba/Getty Images)
The young Brazilian was automatically deregistered on June 30 and cannot be added to the playing squad until more space is freed up. The salary he was paid for those six months has also been automatically subtracted by La Liga from the total available for 2024-25.
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Last year’s club captain Sergi Roberto has held negotiations about extending a contract which ended on June 30, but adding the long-serving utility player to the wage bill is not currently possible.
As it stands, nor can Barca register Olmo, one of Spain’s stars at Euro 2024.
What are Barca doing about it?
Barca have been looking to raise money and ease pressure on their wage bill by selling players.
They have banked around €20million by selling former youth-team players Chadi Riad, Marc Guiu and Estanis Pedrola. United States international Sergino Dest joined PSV Eindhoven on a free transfer, Marcos Alonso left when his contract ended in June and midfielder Oriol Romeu returned to Girona on loan, further cutting their salary spend.
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The Barca hierarchy would ideally like to move on bigger earners, but injuries suffered by defender Ronald Araujo and midfielder Frenkie de Jong make selling them difficult. Others the club would be open to selling, including Torres, Raphinha and Gundogan, have shown no sign of wanting to leave. The bumper salaries of some unwanted players, including Ansu Fati and Clement Lenglet, who were out on loan last season but are automatically registered for 2024-25 on their return, make it difficult to find buyers.
But this week they found a solution?
For months, Barca had been exploring leveraging their kit and merchandising activities to raise more short-term money this summer. That involved Laporta first attempting to end a deal with Nike and then, when a U.S. court ruled that impossible, looking to renegotiate the current arrangement.
In recent weeks, this search has included exploring the possibility that existing commercial partners, such as Nike, Spotify or multinational catering company Aramark, would provide the ‘missing’ investment from the club’s Barca Media project.
Laporta also served as Barca president from 2003-2010 (Eric Alonso/Getty Images)
This is where it gets complicated.
A key reason Barca could add new players in recent summers was the ‘Barca Studios’ lever, first pulled in late summer 2022, when €200million of investment was promised from partners including crypto company Socios.com and Orpheus Media, run by Catalan businessman Jaume Roures.
In June 2023, a new club subsidiary called Barca Vision was launched, containing all its “Web3, NFT and metaverse” activities. This was then included that August in a Barca Media brand, containing all of the club’s digital and audiovisual production activities. At this stage, other investors, including German company Libero, entered a plan that involved floating this spin-off company on the NASDAQ stock exchange, valued at $1billion (by Barca and their partners in the operation, Swiss company Mountain & Co).
Barca Media launched some projects, including NFTs and Laporta’s own presidential podcast (in Catalan) — but the NASDAQ plan fell through and was officially declared over in June this year.
Meanwhile, most of the money Barca said would come from Socios.com, Orpheus Media and Libero never arrived. This year, Barca said they have taken legal action against Libero through the German court system to force payment of €40million they claim is due. Libero declined to comment when approached by The Athletic.
This is especially troublesome as La Liga factored the Barca Vision money into their 2023-24 budget calculations — it is the main reason the club’s permitted salary cap fell so precipitously last year.
It gets even more complicated as Barca’s 2022-23 accounts include the Barca Vision spin-off company as an asset worth €400million. After the failure of the NASDAQ flotation, that valuation looks very optimistic.
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On Thursday, Barca announced that catering supplier Aramark had become a Barca Vision shareholder, as well as a new partner in the Espai Barca Camp Nou rebuild project. The statement said this agreement would “strengthen the Barca Vision structure with a strategic and expert business partner in the search for business opportunities related to the hospitality industry and that of gastronomic experiences within large sporting facilities”.
The statement did not give any details on the finances involved, but it has been widely reported in Barcelona local media that it will bring in €40million to cover the Libero investment in the club’s media business.
Barca hope this will be a step towards satisfying La Liga enough to register their existing and new players.
La Liga president Javier Tebas has been publicly complimentary of how Laporta has cut Barca’s wage bill from its record highs under Bartomeu. There is also regular contact between executives at the Camp Nou and La Liga’s financial unit, and an understanding that Barca are working hard to solve a difficult problem.
However, covering the Libero ‘missing money’ would still only partly fix the €100million hole in Barca’s 2023-24 accounts. So it remains to be seen whether the Aramark deal will be enough to allow leeway to, for example, add Olmo to their official squad.
Could Barca have problems with UEFA too?
Last July, UEFA fined Barca €500,000 for “wrongly reporting” the “disposal of intangible assets” in its accounts for the 2021-22 financial year. In short, European football’s governing body did not accept the counting of ‘lever’ money in a club’s break-even calculations.
Barca appealed that decision, but in November UEFA’s club financial control body appeals chamber confirmed the punishment.
This precedent should be very concerning for Barca, as its 2022-23 accounts included about €600million of lever money — both from future TV rights and Barca Studios. Without counting any ‘levers’ money, Barca’s losses for 2022-23 could be the largest in the history of European club football.
Barca’s temporary home ground on Montjuic, the Estadio Olimpico Lluis Companys (Marc Graupera Aloma/Europa Press via Getty Images)
Clubs who break UEFA’s financial fair play regulations have faced serious punishments in the past. Italian giants Juventus did not play in any UEFA competitions last season after accepting a breach of the rules.
Last December, German media outlet Welt am Sonntag reported that Barca’s likely offence was so serious that it could mean exclusion from the 2024-25 Champions League. UEFA told The Athletic that no decision has been made, and the competition is already underway.
So where do they go from here?
During past summers Laporta and his executives have always found new short-term solutions to keep adding to the squad. Around the Camp Nou, most assume that some new creative idea will be found for Olmo, at least, to play for the team when the season starts.
Further sales of players before the transfer deadline on August 30 also look very likely — raising money to help pay Olmo’s fee and also easing pressure on the salary limit. Some close to the Barca president continue to insist that triggering the €58million release clause of Athletic Bilbao’s Nico Williams remains a possibility.
One positive on the horizon is that Barca’s redeveloped Camp Nou is set to partially re-open in December 2024, a vital step towards substantially increasing matchday revenues, which is crucial for stabilising the club’s finances.
However, once the project is completed, repayments will need to be made on the huge €1.5billion loan secured in a moment of high interest rates.
The Camp Nou reconstruction site pictured in May (Javier Borrego/Europa Press via Getty Images)
A consequence of the levers policy is that Barca are already paying €40million a season from their La Liga TV revenues to U.S. financiers Sixth Street as part of their 2022 agreement.
No specifics of the arrangement have been made public, but Barca’s agreement with Aramark will likely involve money being subtracted from the club’s future merchandising and matchday revenues.
“We hope the can is not just kicked further down the road,” Font told The Athletic last month.
“With Nike, I hope we don’t accept conditions that mortgage our future. With Barca Studios, we hope there are no more strange operations that do not bring medium- and long-term value to the club.”
(Top photo: Pablo Rodriguez/Quality Sport Images/Getty Images)
