Barcelona have failed La Liga’s pre-season financial test, and are now making fantastical claims about Frenkie de Jong’s contract with them.
As the 2022/23 Spanish league season hones into view, it is becoming increasingly clear that there will be two Barcelonas on display. One of them has had an excellent summer, securing the services of Robert Lewandowski, Raphinha, Andreas Christensen, Jules Kounde and more. In pre-season they scored six in each of their last two games against the Mexican side Pumas and Inter Miami, and took a win and a draw from matches against Real Madrid and Juventus.
But then there’s the other Barcelona. The other Barcelona is still deeply, deeply in debt and its financial desperation appears to be causing some sort of decision-making breakdown. It’s a club that has spent a ton of money that it frankly doesn’t have on players that it cannot afford and who may not even be able to start the season.
This version is doing about as good a job as could be of trashing the good name of the institution that bears its name.
It didn’t come as a huge surprise that Barcelona were prevented from registering a number of players for the start of the new season as per La Liga rules, although many had simply assumed that the club would have found an ever so smart way of circumventing them. But this doesn’t mean that the specifics of the reasoning weren’t surprising.
La Liga confirmed that the club had attempted to use its own money to inflate the value of the two asset sales – the ‘economic levers’ that Joan Laporta has repeatedly been referencing. The club had reported the value of these sales at €667m, but found that the amount Barcelona had received directly from investors Sixth Street for two TV rights packages of 10% and 15% respectively was only €517m, with the remaining €150m having been paid by the club itself.
Barcelona set up a venture called Locksley Investments, which purchased the club’s TV rights on a permanent deal, with Sixth Street buying the two packages over the next 25 years. Barcelona then spent €150m of their own money to purchase the rights from the 26th year. That enabled the overall accounting value of the deal to be larger now, announcing two deals, the first for 10% of the club’s La Liga TV rights over 25 years, the second for a further 15%.
This isn’t illegal and has been cleared by the club’s auditors Grant Thornton, but ‘legal’ and ‘within the rules’ don’t mean the…
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