Chris Weatherspoon is The Athletic’s first dedicated football finance writer. Chris is a chartered accountant who uses his professional acumen as The BookKeeper to explore the money behind the game.
Today he is exploring the extraordinary finances of Barcelona but he has previously analysed Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, Tottenham, Newcastle and Aston Villa.
Chris has also written a glossary of football finance terms here.
Barcelona’s time in the wilderness, such as it was, seems to be over.
Last season they clinched another Liga title in Spain, their second in three campaigns after three barren years at the start of the decade. They also reached the Champions League semi-finals for the first time in six seasons. While last Sunday’s trip to Real Madrid proved a losing one, Barca had won four successive Clasicos across all competitions. They are a force once more.
As they are wont to do in football, Barcelona’s on-pitch struggles dovetailed with off-the-pitch concerns. The tale away from the playing field in recent years has been dizzying, one of soaring costs and debts, of quirks and chicanery unseen elsewhere. It has even given rise to a new entrant into the footballing lexicon: palancas, or ‘levers’.
Those levers form a key part of Barca’s financial picture, even as some of them were ‘pulled’ years ago. They had a long-lasting impact on money matters at the Camp Nou, as will the refurbishment works that continue to prevent the club from playing matches at their famous home stadium.
Keeping track of Barcelona’s finances in recent years has been close to impossible, the football accounting equivalent of tackling Hydra — nail down one complicated transaction and another two will swiftly pop up in its place. The Catalan giants declared an “economic recovery and operational efficiency across all areas” when announcing their 2024-25 books in October.
As ever, beneath the bombast, the true picture is more nuanced.
Barca’s position looks stronger than even just a couple of years ago. There is a reason that word — recovery — is a pertinent one, and a reason those levers were pulled.
Where such actions have left Barcelona is a complex question.
To try to answer it, we need to go back to what brought the finances of one of the richest clubs in world football to such a low ebb in the first place.
On August 4, 2017, a 25-year-old Neymar beamed pitchside at the Parc des Princes, Paris Saint-Germain shirt in hand. After four seasons in Spain with Barcelona, the Brazilian forward had signed up for a new life in the French capital. In exchange for Neymar’s departure, Barca received €222million (£195m/$259m at current rates), still the highest fee ever paid for a footballer.
Neymar’s move seemed to further underscore the strength of his former side’s finances. When departing Catalonia, he left a club who had posted six straight years of profits, where wages were less than 60 per cent of revenue and where those revenues were growing healthily — up €164m and 34 per cent in three seasons.
At €648million, Barca’s revenue was football’s third-highest, less than €30m behind Real Madrid and Manchester United. No other club topped €600m. Now, on top of all that, they had the largest transfer fee in history to add to the pile.
Yet what followed the Neymar sale was not years of booming business, but the opposite.
Barcelona made a profit again in 2017-18, but its size, considering it included that world-record fee, was miserly. The club booked a €20.1million pre-tax surplus but only after more than €200m in player profits. Operating performance collapsed, from a €10.5m profit in 2016-17 to a €176.8m loss (as seen below).
They would not book an operating profit again until last season.
That slump was driven by one overriding factor: player spending.
In the seven seasons before the summer of 2017, Barca’s combined expenditure on football wages and transfer amortisation (the annual cost of spreading fees over the term of a player’s contract) was consistently below 60 per cent, only nudging above the latter once (60.3 per cent in 2014-15).
In 2017-18, it was 81.3 per cent.
Before accounting for any of the other costs involved in running a club of Barca’s stature, 81 cents in every euro were gobbled up by football staff costs or the fees paid to bring players to the Camp Nou. And those other running costs were and are massive. The club very quickly became structurally unsound.
Far from using it for long-term investment, they spent the Neymar money instantly. And more.
The year he left, Barcelona paid out an enormous €347.4million on player registrations, principally on new signings (illustrated below). Philippe Coutinho and Ousmane Dembele arrived for more than €100m apiece. In July 2019, Antoine Griezmann did the same. By the end of 2019-20, Barca had spent €960.3m on player fees, €399m net, in just three seasons. Between 2017 and 2019, their spending across football-related wages and amortisation rose from €367.4m to €593.9m — a €226.6m (62 per cent) increase.
Expensive signings naturally meant expensive wages, but so did another seismic event at that time: Lionel Messi’s contract extension.
On November 25, 2017, a few months after the sale of Neymar, and in between the arrivals of Dembele and Coutinho, Messi signed a deal to keep him at the club until the summer of 2021.
The official announcement from Barcelona put Messi’s new buyout clause of €700million front and centre but did not disclose how much his services would cost them over the next 43 months. That would only become clear more than three years later, when Spanish newspaper El Mundo obtained, and leaked, the contract’s details.
Lionel Messi renewed his Barcelona contract in November 2017 (Toru Yamanaka/AFP via Getty Images)
The figures were eye-watering, especially by the time of that Mundo report, with Barca’s financial position then under immense strain. The deal agreed in late 2017, backdated to the beginning of that season, entitled Messi to potential gross salary payments of €555.2million over the next four years.
Salary payments across the Argentinian’s employment and image-rights contracts totalled up to €288.6million, a renewal bonus landed him €115.2m and a loyalty bonus for staying beyond February 2020 would provide another €77.9m. Other elements of the contract were performance-related, so not everything was achieved, but estimates of the eventual payments due to Messi over that deal still totalled €515m.
That’s an enormous figure on its own, and even more so in context. From 2017-18 to 2020-21, only two clubs other than Barcelona spent more than that on their total wage bills in four years. Outside of Real Madrid and neighbours Atletico, before taxes, Messi is estimated to have out-earned total staff wages at every other Spanish club. The wage bill at Sevilla, the fourth-highest-spending Spanish side in that time, was €479.3million, €36m less than his estimated gross salary.
Messi didn’t actually receive everything due to him until after he had left the club at the end of that contract, being one among many who agreed to defer chunky wage payments to soothe Barca’s monetary ills.
Those deferrals arose in the wake of the other main factor that took a sledgehammer to club finances: the Covid-19 pandemic.
Few businesses anywhere were left untouched by that, but in football, the richest teams felt the most immediate strain. With stadium doors shuttered but big wages still to pay, clubs were met with a huge imbalance.
In Barcelona’s case, matchday income fell from €174.9million in 2018-19 to €23.7m two years later. The salary deferrals Messi and company consented to led total wages to drop from €541.9m to just under €490m in each of the two seasons most affected by Covid-19, but a €262m reduction in overall revenue more than ate up those savings. A due diligence report carried out by Deloitte in 2021 found €389m in player salaries had been deferred, underlining the extent to which Barca struggled to pay the bills during the pandemic.
And of course, a deferral didn’t mean those bills wouldn’t eventually fall due.
That torpedoing of club finances, alongside Messi handing in a transfer request in August 2020, ended with club president Josep Maria Bartomeu resigning before he was pushed in October that year. Taking his place was the returning Joan Laporta, who had previously been Barcelona president between 2003 and 2010.
Laporta arrived armed with a plan to fix Barcelona’s money troubles — and was keen to blame as much of the situation as possible on the Bartomeu regime.
In 2020-21, Barca recorded a €555.4million pre-tax loss, by a long way the worst financial result ever recorded by a football club.
Although Laporta highlighted “serious deficiencies in the way the previous management ran the club” as the reason behind “the worst accounts in Barca history”, that enormous loss was in part a choice of the new regime. Barca impaired player values to the tune of €160.6million that season, as well as booking €84.1m in provisions related to tax and legal proceedings. Those costs were signed off by the club’s auditors, but also helped Laporta and his lieutenants present a cleaner slate from 2021-22 onwards.
The club did indeed turn a profit in 2021-22, the first full season of Laporta’s second term, but there was a significant caveat.
Enter… the levers.
Laporta and new signing Robert Lewandowski in August 2022 (Urbanandsport/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In representations to a Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) panel in late 2024, Barcelona stated the current board of directors, upon their appointment following Laporta’s election, “recognised that monetising some of (the club’s) non-sport assets was the most effective and virtually the only way to recover its equity position”. They said doing so “aimed to avoid a direct effect on (the club’s) members while maintaining direct competitiveness on the field”.
Barca sought to alleviate not only general financial woes but also pressure from La Liga, whose squad cost limit (SCL) rule was causing them no end of trouble (illustrated below). Designed to restrict clubs from spending more than they can afford, the rule subtracts non-sporting expenses from expected revenues, with the remaining figure comprising a team’s squad spending limit for the season. Crucially, SCL is forward-looking. It places limits on clubs registering players in an advanced attempt to stop debts from building.
By the winter of 2022, Barca’s finances were so bleak that their SCL figure was negative (€144.4million in the red). Plainly, that was impossible to meet, but in practical terms, it meant they couldn’t register new players — and would need to find an awful lot of revenue, or cut a lot of costs, to change that.
Unable, but also unwilling, to ramp up membership fees for their fans in the wake of the pandemic, and similarly averse to putting themselves at any footballing disadvantage, the decision was made to sell off long-term assets for a short-term boost.
If that sounds negligent, it is worth highlighting that Barca, like Real Madrid, are more limited than most of football’s elite when it comes to extricating themselves from financial trouble. Madrid, for example, sold a slice in the operations of their revamped Bernabeu stadium in 2022, handing over a 20-year stake in exchange for €360million.
Their member-owned status, and the relative inability to pour money in that confers, means both clubs need to be run on an even keel. And for much of the first quarter of the 21st century, Barca were. Between 2003 and 2019, they lost money in just two seasons, racking up net pre-tax profits over the period of €228.8million.
When that turned rapidly around, and the pandemic added further strain, options for recourse were fewer than at, say, PSG, where owner funding between 2019 and 2024 totalled €671.4million. Or at Manchester City and Chelsea, where significant past owner funding (and the knowledge future disbursements could underwrite costs, if needed) enabled those two English sides to drop a combined €468m on new players in 2020-21, when the rest of world football was wrestling with the repercussions of games played in empty stadiums. Perhaps coincidentally, City and Chelsea contested that season’s Champions League final.
Barcelona could have dropped their player spending off a cliff, but in an era where they have to compete on the continental stage with billionaire backers and the wealth of nations, it is understandable that they took the course they did, even if short-term gains were prioritised over long-term thinking.
The first of those gains came in June 2022, when Barca announced the sale of 10 per cent of their La Liga TV money distributions over the next 25 years. The buyer was Sixth Street, a U.S. investment group that paid €267.1million, then came back a few weeks later and spent another €400.4m on a further 15 per cent of the same rights.
In all, Barca forwent 25 per cent of domestic TV money over the next quarter-century for an immediate boost of €667.5million. The first sale to Sixth Street fell into the 2021-22 financial year, the second in 2022-23.
The cash boost helped offset an operating cash deficit in the latter season of nearly €200million. A buyback clause, of unknown cost, allows Barca to reacquire these rights before the 25-year term is up. But, in the meantime, their sale meant giving up a hefty slice of annual revenues.
The impact is clear from a look at broadcast income since. It rose three per cent last season, a byproduct of that run to the Champions League semi-finals. Yet money from TV rights in 2024-25 only represented a rebound to where they sat in 2021-22 — the final year Barca enjoyed their full share of La Liga money.
Since getting into business with Sixth Street, Barcelona have already handed over around €120million of TV money, or 18 per cent of the sum they received when pulling the levers. Even if La Liga’s rights were to remain stagnant between now and the deal’s end in 2047, Barca’s relinquished TV money would total €1billion — 50 per cent more than the amount the club received for selling the rights in 2022. In effect, the deal would be equivalent to a 25-year loan at 3.5 per cent interest, and that’s only if the rights don’t increase in value.
In line with the refusal to sacrifice competitiveness on the field, Barcelona spent €162.9million in 2022-23, the most in Spanish football, principally on Raphinha, Jules Kounde and Robert Lewandowski. Yet La Liga wasn’t satisfied that all of the Sixth Street money could be recognised immediately, leaving the club in a position where they had spent heavily to sign players they couldn’t actually register to play.
So, alongside that second TV rights sale, that season brought the pulling of two more levers, both related to Barca Studios. That was an entity founded under Bartomeu to produce audiovisual content, and by 2022, it was in Laporta’s sightline as a quick way to ease the club’s financial troubles.
On July 29, Barca sold a 24.5 per cent stake in Bridgeburg Invest, S.L. — an entity set up by the club ostensibly to facilitate a partial sale of the Barca Studios asset — to Socios, a blockchain-based platform. That generated €100million, as did a second 24.5 per cent stake bought 13 days later by Orpheus Media, a production company.
Barca booked a €192.9million gain after costs on those two transactions, and they weren’t finished there. Still in possession of 51 per cent of Bridgeburg, the club then recognised the entity as an associate rather than a subsidiary, meaning a loss of control had occurred. Consequently, they could recognise their Bridgeburg stake as an in-year paper gain, rather than consolidating Bridgeburg’s results into the club’s group financials.
No cash had or would change hands for the latter lever, but, having sold 49 per cent for €200million, Barca could value their 51 per cent stake at €208.2m.
In conjunction with the two share sales and the 15 per cent TV rights disposal, it meant these various levers generated an €801.5m accounting profit in 2022-23 alone. In turn, La Liga lifted their SCL by the same amount. It was needed: Barca’s wage bill leapt to €625.7m that season, a club record and the third-highest wage bill in European football history, with the rise largely a result of those previously deferred salaries.
La Liga’s position changed again when it transpired Barcelona had only received an initial €10million apiece from Socios and Orpheus Media for the Bridgeburg shares. Those two buyers went on to sell chunks of their stakes to Libero Football Finance, a German company, and NIPA Capital, based in the Netherlands. Barca would later pursue payment from Libero for those shares through the German courts.
Those Barca Studios deals provided a €401million boost to the bottom line, but large chunks have been reversed since. In 2023-24, Barca recognised a €135m impairment on the amounts due to them from the two €100m share sales, essentially accepting that the money would never arrive.
Barca Studios was so contentious it led Grant Thornton, the club’s former auditors, to qualify the audit opinion it issued for the club’s 2023-24 accounts. What does that mean? In simple terms, the auditors refused to agree with the valuation Barca placed on their stake in Barca Studios, via Bridgeburg. Citing those failures to receive payment for the share sales, Grant Thornton deemed the stake in Barca Studios (by then rebranded by the club as Barca Vision) overstated and in need of impairment; Barcelona disagreed, and so the company highlighted its view that the valuation shown in the club’s books was materially inaccurate. Barca refused to book that impairment in 2023-24, but did so when restating that year’s figures in their latest accounts.
New auditors have since replaced Grant Thornton, and while it may seem curious that Barca would accept an impairment they had stood so firmly against a year earlier, it is worth remembering La Liga’s cost-control rules look forward rather than back. With 2023-24 out of the way, there was less harm, at least domestically, in retrospectively booking an impairment charge which came to €86.1million and sent that year’s pre-tax loss soaring to €204.5m.
Victor Font, who finished second behind Laporta in 2021 and may stand again in the next presidential election, recently cited the delayed impairment charge as evidence of “a lack of transparency” and an example of the board hiding losses from members.
Further impairments followed last season. After a scrapped plan to float Barca Media, a new brand overseeing all of the club’s digital and audiovisual production activities and under which Bridgeburg (and Barca Vision) sat, the latter was merged with Barca Produccions, which formerly held Barcelona’s stake in Bridgeburg.
That reduced the club’s ownership of Barca Produccions from 100 per cent to 53.4 per cent, and the collegiate management of the merged company means Barca Produccions can no longer be consolidated into Barcelona’s group accounts. The value of that loss of control, alongside a reassessment of the value of Barca Produccions generally (ie, the business Bridgeburg merged with), saw €65million in impairment charges hit Barca’s 2024-25 bottom line. Of the €401.1m recognised in relation to Barca Vision in 2022-23, €286.2m has since been impaired.
That big hit to last season’s income statement was negated by another lever being pulled.
The renovation works at the Camp Nou will eventually result in 9,600 VIP seats at Barca’s home stadium, to be sold for premium prices. In January this year, the club concluded the sale of a ‘personal seat licence (PSL)’ for 475 of those seats, with those PSLs lasting up to 30 years.
In essence, the club sold the rights to those seats over the next three decades to buyers who can choose to use the seat or sell the rights to do so on to another party. Barcelona have given up their rights over the seats in exchange for guaranteed income. In this instance, the 475 sold so far generated €100million for the club.
The under-renovation Camp Nou last month (Josep Lago/AFP via Getty Images)
Of that €100million, Barca were able to book €71.6m as revenue in 2024-25, with the remaining €28.4m to be recorded in future periods (the determination behind those amounts isn’t detailed in their accounts).
To understand why Barca’s battle with La Liga’s SCL remains ongoing, consider what their pre-tax result would have been last season if the entirety of the PSL income had been excluded: an €80million loss. It is also why the reopening of the Camp Nou is so important.
Whether any more such measures will be undertaken is unknown.
In June 2022, Laporta got permission from members to sell up to 49.9 per cent of Barca Licensing & Merchandising (BLM), a commercial subsidiary. It hasn’t happened yet, and club treasurer Ferran Olive said last month that BLM would not be sold.
It is easy to see why Barca are keen to avoid pulling that lever. BLM’s revenue soared above the €150million mark last season. On its own, Barca’s commercial subsidiary generated more than the most recent total revenue of every Spanish club other than Real Madrid, Atletico, Sevilla and Real Sociedad.
In the first week of April 2014, Barcelona’s club members — known as ‘socios’ in Spanish — held a historic vote.
More than 27,000 of them, 72 per cent of those polled, approved New Espai Barca, a project to improve and extend Barca’s Camp Nou home, as well as its surroundings. Alongside the remodelled football stadium would be a new Palau Blaugrana, where Barca’s basketball, handball, hockey and futsal teams would play.
In all, those and other works in the area were slated to take place in four years between May 2017 and March 2021. Espai Barca would set the club back €600million, funded in three equal but distinct ways: €200m in naming rights for the new Camp Nou, €200m from their positive operating cash flow and €200m via a bank loan.
Nearly 12 years on, the project remains ongoing and costs have ballooned.
That original €600million budget was scrapped in 2021, when Laporta returned to the presidency, with the project barely up and running, never mind close to a finish as intended. Only the 6,000-capacity Estadi Johan Cruyff, a new football ground for the women’s team, reserve side and under-19s to play their home games, had been completed.
Late that year, socios held another vote on the financing of Espai Barca, approving Laporta’s plan with a greater majority than in the results of that original 2014 poll.
The new spending limit approved for the project was €1.5billion, one and a half times the previously agreed budget. Works at the Camp Nou were now priced at €900m, more than double the original €420m. The new Palau Blaugrana would cost €420m by the time it and surrounding amenities were finished, up from €90m. Even funds allocated to urban planning in the space were an order of magnitude higher, rising from €20m to €100m.
Four years later, that revised project is running behind schedule too, and the costs are flowing — €106million was spent on Espai Barca in 2022-23, €322m more a year later and a further €415m last season. To the end of June 2025, the project had cost Barca €975m in capital spending (illustrated below). Plenty more will follow.
When the works will be complete is anyone’s guess. The remodelled Camp Nou was meant to be largely finished by the start of this season, but Barca are in a battle to reopen it, even at reduced capacity. Returning to the club’s iconic ground this year has been the epitome of jam tomorrow; their first two home games in this season’s La Liga had to be played at the tiny Estadi Johan Cruyff and Barca have since gone back to the Estadi Olimpic Lluis Companys, their temporary home ground that once hosted the 1992 Olympic Games. Last week, the club announced they would hold an open training session at the Camp Nou this Friday for a maximum of 23,000 fans “as part of the process of the gradual reopening of the stadium”.
The delays have only added to the financial impact. Costs on Espai Barca are around the €1billion mark, but that doesn’t include the loss of revenue the club have suffered as a result of moving out of the Camp Nou. Average attendances at the Lluis Companys have been around half the 83,498 figure at the Camp Nou in 2022-23, and every missed deadline sets back the boost to Barca’s top line.
The club claim Espai Barca will eventually generate €250million in annual revenue. That money is vital, not only to ongoing operations, but to servicing the costs of Espai Barca itself. The impact of the project on the club’s balance sheet has been pronounced, so much so that Laporta persuaded socios to temporarily suspend article 67 of the club’s statutes, which limits the level of debt Barcelona can carry.
Just as those palancas were required to combat wince-inducing operating losses in lieu of any owner funding, so they have had to source alternative means to meet the growing Espai Barca bill.
It has come in the form of huge borrowing.
As recently as 2018, Barcelona’s debt sat at just €67.2million. A first €40m tranche relating to Espai Barca was borrowed the following season, but that coincided with a marked increase in the club’s lending. A further €160m unrelated to the Espai Barca project was added in debt in 2018-19, before the arrival of the pandemic a year later blasted a hole in a ship already looking rather burdened by the costs heaped upon it.
Barca pulled down €117.8million on previously untouched short-term facilities soon after the virus shut football’s doors, and by June 2021, the club’s cash need was so great they took out an €80m bridging loan with Goldman Sachs to “cover treasury obligations for a period of 90 days”. In the same month, members were called upon, and agreed, to approve a debt refinance with Goldman Sachs for €525m, with total lending from the U.S. firm ultimately hitting €595m.
Repayments on the payment loan drain around €30million annually from club coffers, with a one-off €265.7m due in the 2031-32 season. Interest costs on the loan are unknown but are expected to be low; when announcing the deal, Barcelona’s stated aim was a rate of three per cent.
Add on €907.7million in Espai Barca debts, alongside a smattering of smaller borrowings, and you wind up at a gross debt figure of €1.45billion — the largest in world football.
This figure will only rise as the Espai Barca project continues.
Even nailing down a debt figure hasn’t been simple.
A year ago, Barca’s gross debt was listed at, and widely reported as, €1.81billion. Two years ago, it was €1.62bn. How then, with the cost of Espai Barca only rising, is the latest figure lower than either of those at €1.45bn?
The answer lies in a change in accounting treatment.
Debt for the Espai Barca project is held by a securitisation fund set up in 2023 to finance the works. In simple terms, the fund raises money, principally via debt, then passes it along to Barcelona for use on the build. In return, they will pay back the loans over time via the extra funding raised by the Camp Nou following its refurbishment.
The fund was previously deemed under Barca’s control, so its assets and liabilities were included as part of their consolidated financials. But the fund’s activity isn’t limited to passing money along to the club. Upon inception, the securitisation fund raised more than €1billion in debt, far beyond what Barcelona needed to borrow at that point.
As a result, their debt figure last season included the full extent of the securitisation fund’s borrowings, whether or not those borrowings had then been passed onto the club.
This time around, their new auditors have determined Barcelona actually don’t have control over the fund, and that its assets and liabilities therefore shouldn’t be included in the club’s consolidated financials. As a result, only the debts owed by Barca to the fund are included. As those are lower than the total borrowings of the fund, the debt figure has fallen in comparison to the 2023-24 accounts.
In reality, Barca’s debt is still rising. Eventually, it’s expected that the full extent of the fund’s debts will again appear on the club’s books, as the Espai project’s costs rise until completion.
It is not just in Spain that Barcelona’s finances have caused regulatory trouble. For two seasons running, the club fell foul of European football governing body UEFA’s strictures, albeit in different ways.
In 2022-23, they ran into trouble for misclassification of revenue, after trying to include the first €267million tranche from the sale of TV rights in their break-even calculation. Barca appealed the decision and the €500,000 fine meted out, but a CAS panel sided with UEFA. The panel found the financial penalty was, contrary to the club’s view, “actually rather mild”.
Barcelona avoided a breach of the break-even requirement that season even after that €267million transaction was discounted, in part due to adjustments related to the impact of Covid-19. That wasn’t the case a year later, as UEFA looked even more dimly upon those levers than La Liga did, and Barca breached the new Football Earnings rule in its first year of operation. For that, they received a further €15m fine and entered into a two-year Settlement Agreement with UEFA.
Further financial penalties could follow. If Barca exceed the Football Earnings targets agreed in either this season or the next one, they’ll be fined up to €22.5million in each year — and that’s only if the excess is €20m or less. If they exceed their target by more than €20m in either season, they’ll be deemed in breach of the Settlement Agreement and be banned from European competition for a year.
Barcelona booked another loss in 2024-25, though at €8.4million (or €16.9m post-tax), it was markedly down on recent years. That included the €71.6million PSL income, a probable one-off unlikely to be repeated, but the counterbalance will be recurring revenue generated from the reopened Camp Nou — whenever it does reopen.
Football costs drove Barca’s malaise and, while they rose last year, at €471.4million across football wages and amortisation, they were more than €120m below 2019’s scary peak. In combination with revenue, which is once more growing, it led to a first operating profit in eight years (€72.1m). Total wages as a proportion of revenue were at 52 per cent, a 12-year low.
Revenue growth was driven by a big increase in commercial income. Bartomeu’s reign is now known for its rampant expenditure but the club thrived under his hand commercially. That income stream roughly doubled in the five years between Bartomeu coming to power and the onset of the pandemic, in part because of the decision to bring retail activities in-house in 2018-19 via the setting up of BLM.
The growth has continued. Barca booked their PSL income as commercial income but even if we remove that on the basis it is a one-off, their commercial revenue likely still topped €500million, using an estimate of Deloitte’s definition.
It has been driven by some big deals with worldwide brands. A renewed agreement with Nike earns the club €108million annually, and will rise to €120m in 2028. The Nike contract included a further €158m as a signing bonus. A Camp Nou naming rights and front-of-shirt sponsorship with Spotify garners €55m annually. The BLM business is generating hefty sums.
Elsewhere, player sales have dropped, even as finances have improved, an inversion of the Bartomeu days. The huge Neymar deal set in train a course of ruinous transfer spending, even as player sales provided a healthy source of income. Between 2017 and 2020, Barcelona booked €376.9million in player profits, which is just as well given operating losses in the same period were €432.3m.
Sales have been less bountiful since, despite the departures of Dembele, Franck Kessie and Nico Gonzalez generating €80.6million profit in 2023-24. Barca’s combined profit on player sales across the past five seasons totals just €81.4m, and would likely be even lower were it not for that €160m impairment in player values booked in 2021-22. That level of player profits is middling domestically, a long way behind the two Madrid sides and several rivals in wider Europe.
Transfer spending under Laporta has fallen, at least since that 2022 summer of Raphinha, Kounde and Lewandowski. In the past two seasons, Barca’s net spend was just €3.9million. In the summer just gone, their net outlay was around that again, though Marcus Rashford did arrive on a season-long loan from Manchester United involving sizeable wages.
Reduced spending is a reality, even as Barca continue to make decisions which jar with the idea of them getting back on an even keel.
Last year’s debacle surrounding Dani Olmo was a case in point.
Signed, like the 2022 trio, before he could be registered, the €60million buy from RB Leipzig ended up only being cleared to play in the first half of the season via a long-term injury to new team-mate Andreas Christensen. Then, in January, as La Liga pushed back against the club’s recognition of the VIP seat revenue, Olmo and fellow newcomer Pau Victor were only registered when the Spanish government stepped in.
For all that their transfer spending has reduced, Barcelona’s €81.7million net transfer debt at the end of June is a high for La Liga, reflecting minimal spending around the rest of the division. They still owe notable sums on Raphinha (€42.3m), Olmo (€33.7m) and Kounde (€25.0m), as well as Vitor Roque (€17.2m), Ferran Torres (€13.8m) and Lewandowski (€11.3m). A net €100.2m in transfer instalments is due this season (a net €18.5m is owed to Barca in future years), further squeezing cash in the short term.
Even with signings such as Olmo, Barcelona’s squad cost at the end of June was outside the world game’s top 15. The book value of their players is even lower than that, just €188.9million, but the club make a point in their latest accounts to highlight this figure bearing no resemblance to what they’d generate were they to sell some of them in the modern transfer market.
Barca claim the “fair value of (the squad) is more than €1billion higher than its net book value”, which, while subjective, is probably not far from true. In Lamine Yamal, Gavi, Fermin Lopez, Alejandro Balde and Pau Cubarsi, they boast several products of their ‘La Masia’ youth academy with minimal book value who would bring in big fees if they were sold. Yamal’s transfer value alone is routinely pegged by independent outlets above €300million.
Recognising those market values would boost Barcelona’s financial standing but likely diminish their ability to compete — and a reluctance to sell stars was part of what drove them down the palancas route in the first place.
Retaining players who cost little to acquire keeps transfer spending down but the flip side is that those same players know their value and want to be paid accordingly. Barca’s football wage bill is rising again, up €26.3million (seven per cent) last season. Only one month of Yamal’s new contract, which can be worth a potential €40m annually, fell into last season’s figures, so another increase this year would be little surprise.
Barcelona remain an enigma.
In many other businesses, and at many other football clubs, heavy cost-cutting and a shift away from financial largesse would have been the order of the day. Not so in Catalonia, where, under the hand of Laporta, in a presidential role where popularity is key to sticking around, Barca instead opted to find ever more novel ways of raising money. Laporta faces elections in 2026, and approval of his decisions will likely be made clear. Barring a collapse in on-field fortunes between now and polling day, he is expected to secure another term in office.
Barca’s transfer spending has been trimmed in recent years, but wages remain lofty to keep hold of young stars. Their €510million wage bill from 2024-25 only trailed PSG and Manchester City in Europe, based on most recent figures, though that number includes the hefty cost of Barca employing players of various other sports as well as huge off-field staffing levels.
Things remain far from normal.
Last season, even as underlying numbers rebounded, Barcelona’s finances remained sufficiently open to interpretation that the club changed auditors not once but twice.
They opted not to renew their relationship with Grant Thornton, and Crowe signed off the 2024-25 accounts. Between those two, an undisclosed third audit firm was in place, ostensibly around the time Barca sought to book the full €100million in PSL income. The identity of these other auditors has never been officially disclosed, though Spanish sports newspaper Diario AS reported in April that it was Abauding, a Barcelona-based firm. Abauding did not respond to The Athletic’s attempt to confirm their involvement with the club last season.
Such uncertainty and flux in a company’s auditors is rarely a good sign.
Nor is the sheer weight of restatements in Barcelona’s most recent sets of accounts.
Restating previous figures is hardly unique to them, but the frequency with which Barca have been required to do so lately speaks to a club who have spent several years trying to find novel ways through their financial problems.
Rashford celebrating his fourth Champions League goal of the season last month (Image Photo Agency/Getty Images)
Even as the club project revenues in excess of €1billion for 2025-26, this summer saw them in yet more trouble with La Liga rules. In August, Laporta’s board offered personal assets as backing to €7million in borrowings required to boost Barcelona’s SCL figure and enable them to register both Rashford and new goalkeeper Joan Garcia ahead of the new season.
Getting the Camp Nou open and back to capacity as soon as possible is of paramount importance.
Debts are massive and while that isn’t bad in and of itself, the club’s grim past finances have undermined future confidence. Some €424million of the Espai Barca debt was recently refinanced at a lower average interest rate of 5.19 per cent, but that is still two points higher than the 3.2 per cent at which Real Madrid’s stadium debt is secured, for example. With such high debts, repayable over decades, higher interest rates will impact Barca’s ability to compete with their old rivals from the Bernabeu.
It is too early to declare Barcelona a club recovered from the depths they plumbed just a few years ago.
The Camp Nou delays are not indicative of slick running. Nor are the ongoing battles to comply with rules both at home and abroad. Short-term liabilities still heavily outweigh assets. Overall profitability remains elusive. The club continue to seek alternative means of raising funds; the recently cancelled attempt to host a Liga fixture between Barca and Villarreal in Miami, Florida, was attractive in large part because of the money it would have generated.
Yet Laporta’s bold strategy is, in a few ways, working as hoped.
On the pitch, Barca are competing again, entertaining again. Under coach Hansi Flick’s guidance, they boast an exciting young squad laden with value. The obvious lesson, showing now as it did two decades ago, is that they are better off trusting in their youth setup than splurging on transfers.
The latter nearly ruined them.
The journey from that folly has been fascinating.
Mes que un club? They weren’t kidding.
