Olmo affair has raised questions over Laporta’s quick fixes – are Barcelona running out of road?

Barcelona signing Dani Olmo for €60million in last year’s summer window and then potentially losing him on a free transfer five months later is one of the most dramatic and barely believable sagas at a top European club in some time.

It is also the sadly predictable consequence of the constant improvising and pulling of so-called financial levers that’s been going on at Barca since Joan Laporta returned for a second spell as club president almost four years ago.

The possibility of Olmo and fellow summer 2024 arrival Pau Victor’s La Liga registrations lapsing at mid-season was flagged well in advance. It’s just the latest example of how Barcelona have kept signing players during Laporta’s second presidency despite the club’s deep financial issues and without knowing if these recruits can be registered within La Liga’s strict salary cap rules.

Similar issues in multiple recent transfer windows were allowed to drift until the last minute, when increasingly creative solutions have been found to kick the can even further down the road. The problem has soon returned, and in an even more problematic shape.

Some of Laporta’s improvisational lever-pulling can be defended. Barca selling a part of their future TV rights to U.S. investor Sixth Street in the summer of 2021 was not too dissimilar from the arrangement La Liga itself organised for most of its clubs with the UK-headquartered CVC Capital Partners. Real Madrid have also partnered with Sixth Street to help fund the renovation of their Bernabeu stadium.

Olmo during an open training session (Manaure Quintero/AFP via Getty Images)

Much more problematic have always been the levers tugged in summer 2022, a process which Barcelona claimed would raise €200million. They sold shares in a ‘Barca Studios’ arm of the club to crypto company Socios.com and Orpheus Media, a firm run by Catalan businessman Jaume Roures.

These deals allowed Barca to register that summer’s signings — including Robert Lewandowski and Raphinha — within La Liga’s salary limit on the eve of the 2022-23 season. However, the vast majority of that €200million has never arrived.

German investor Libero came on board in August 2023 but quickly left again, a proposed €1billion flotation on New York’s NASDAQ stock market failed completely and last summer, the club’s catering partner Aramark surprisingly bought an emergency share in the zombie project.

Through these financial twists and turns, La Liga has arguably been remarkably lenient, perhaps because its president Javier Tebas wants a strong Barcelona to help the league’s overall brand. La Liga officials took the club’s word on that initial €200million Barca Studios injection, and the league also accepted personal guarantees from board members to register Jules Kounde, Joao Felix and Joao Cancelo after they were signed in recent summers.

Fans and pundits in Barcelona have — mostly — stuck with Laporta through all the drama of his second presidency, accepting that his charisma and creativity were their best bet to fix the deep financial problems inherited from predecessor Josep Maria Bartomeu. When club legend Lionel Messi shockingly left on a free transfer in the summer of 2021 after his contract expired, the blame was successfully deflected onto Bartomeu and Tebas. Lewandowski coming in and scoring the goals which won La Liga’s 2022-23 title arguably showed the levers policy was paying off.

By last summer, the idea of Barcelona signing players even though it was unclear whether they could be registered with La Liga was well established.

Although Barca knew they had already exceeded their allowed salary limit for 2024-25, Laporta first unsuccessfully chased Spanish international winger Nico Williams of Bilbao’s Athletic Club, then successfully signed his Euro 2024-winning Spain team-mate Olmo from RB Leipzig of Germany for a fee in the region of €60million (£50m/$61.6m at current exchange rates). Young forward Victor was also purchased from Catalonia neighbours Girona for €2.7m.

Olmo and Victor had to watch the season’s first two La Liga games from the stands until defender Andreas Christensen’s long-term Achilles tendon injury just before the summer window shut on September 1 allowed them to be registered under the now famous rule 77 of La Liga’s regulations. But they could only be registered until the end of 2024.

At a press conference on September 3, Laporta said Barcelona were “€60million away” from sorting their salary limit issues (‘returning to 1:1’, as it is often described in Spain) but assured everyone a lucrative renegotiation of the club’s kit deal with Nike would soon solve the problem.

Laporta, centre, has regularly used financial ‘levers’ during his current reign (Linnea Rheborg/Getty Images)

“We could have been at 1:1 this summer, but we thought it better to wait and get a better contract,” Laporta said then. “With the better kit deal we will be OK, without needing Barcelona Vision.”

The situation became even more complicated in early October when Barca’s auditors wrote down a previous €400million valuation of the Barcelona Vision subsidiary (the latest version of the Barca Studios project). That meant a €12m profit in ‘ordinary’ trading in the 2023-24 accounts became a net loss of €91m. La Liga reacted by further lowering Barcelona’s salary limit — meaning even more new money was required to register Olmo and Victor past December 31.

That date still seemed far away as the team performed superbly under new coach Hansi Flick, hammering Bayern Munich in the Champions League and arch-rivals Madrid in La Liga during one joyful week in late October. It appeared much closer though when the new Nike deal, announced in mid-November, did not add enough money to the 2024-25 accounts to register Olmo and Victor for the second half of the season.

That led to more improvisation to try to find the funds required. In recent months, Laporta has visited Qatar, Dubai, Mongolia and Azerbaijan.

Another lever was landed upon: selling future revenues from the VIP zones in the club’s under-refurbishment Camp Nou stadium at a discounted rate. This was classic Laporta: selling seats which do not yet exist in a stadium where his team cannot currently play because it’s still a building site to investors whose identities were not revealed for a price that was also unclear.

It was now clear that La Liga was no longer prepared to accept Barcelona’s word about their finances and needed to see written contracts and financial statements. Unlike with Barca Studios in 2022, it refused to accept the promise that the money would arrive. Barca reacted with an (unsuccessful) court challenge to La Liga’s registration rules, further damaging their relationship with the governing body.

So as the year turned, Olmo and Victor were duly removed from the official list of Barcelona players on La Liga’s website. Rules say a player cannot be registered twice for the same club in one season.

It was revealed in December by Spanish news outlet Mundo Deportivo that forward Olmo has a clause in his contract allowing him to leave Barcelona on a free transfer if he is not registered this month. It has to be exercised by him, though, and at this point the 26-year-old has no plan other than staying at his boyhood club, having only just rejoined them after a decade playing in Croatia and Germany. 

Still, Barcelona have continued to push the idea that a solution will somehow be found. Olmo and Victor have been assured it will all turn out OK, and they have continued to train with Flick’s squad.

Laporta’s undoubted genius for improvisation suggests a temporary solution might be found, even at this late date, allowing one or both of them to play for the club at least until the season ends in late May, and pushing the problem further into the future. 

Barcelona fans have become used to such creativity, but worries about the consequences of these moves have been rising. Each lever the board pulls cedes more power over club finances to external partners and raises fears over the future of Barca’s member-owned model. Even more scary for supporters is the potential for forced sales of the team’s biggest names, especially the latest emerging homegrown superstar Lamine Yamal. Future potential signings will also surely now think twice about joining a club who treat players the way Olmo and Victor have been.

Criticism of Laporta’s management of the club has been getting louder. Past, and probably future, presidential candidate Victor Font has continued to rail against the “friends and family” way Laporta runs Barca. The next elections are not due until early 2026, but in theory could come sooner. Joan Camprubi Montal, the grandson and great-grandson of past Barcelona presidents, has called for Laporta to resign over the ‘Olmo affair’. Other potential challengers include Jordi Termes, the founder of Spanish payments app Bizum.

Flick’s side have started dropping off form-wise (Josep Lago/AFP via Getty Images)

Barcelona’s problems have also been mounting on the pitch.

Flick’s team have dropped to third in La Liga, having played more matches than the two sides above them, after a run of one win in seven games. Supporters unconcerned by financial manoeuvrings tend to care more about their team consistently losing.

Next week’s Spanish Supercopa in Saudi Arabia could help — or not. Beating Madrid in a Clasico final would be a huge boost for everyone. Further defeats will be extra painful, especially if Olmo is absent — and even more so if he were to end up joining another club this month. Barcelona would still be on the hook for his transfer fee and full contract agreed, as last summer. That would be another €100million drag on the club’s finances, with the matter of the Barca Studios lever also still to be resolved.

Laporta’s bargain with Barcelona’s members — known as ‘socios’ — has always been that his schemes and levers would kickstart a ‘virtuous cycle’ with success on the pitch raising revenues, which will then further increase the team’s competitive level. It worked during his first term as president from 2003-10 — off-pitch controversies were quickly forgotten when the team won the Champions League in 2006, 2009 and again in the season after his departure.

The constant improvisation during his second term has now stretched the credibility of his leadership right to the limit. Or possibly beyond.

The ‘Olmo affair’ raises a very difficult question for Barcelona and club members: have Laporta and his levers policy finally run out of road?

(Top photo of Dani Olmo: Lluis Gene/AFP via Getty Images)