How FC Barcelona blew a fortune — and got worse

Before the pandemic, Barcelona became the first club in any sport ever to surpass $1bn in annual revenues. Now its gross debt is about $1.4bn, much of it short-term.

Spain’s La Liga has blocked it from spending any more money it doesn’t have. Barça has faced obstacles to giving a new contract to the world’s best and ­highest-paid footballer, Lionel Messi, even though he has reportedly agreed to cut his pay by half. The club has put most of its other players in an everything-must-go sale, with few takers so far.

The pandemic hurt, but it was only the coup de grâce. Almost invisibly, Barcelona has been in free fall ever since the night in Berlin in June 2015 when it won its fourth Champions League final in 10 years. The club had achieved dominance on the cheap, thanks to a one-off generation of brilliant footballers from its own youth academy. Back then, Barça could afford to sign almost anybody in football. In any talent business, the most important management decision is recruitment. But Barcelona lost the “war for talent”. What went wrong?

Barça’s process for buying players is unusually messy. Rival currents inside the club each push for different signings, often without bothering to inform the head coach. Candidates for the Barça presidency campaign on promises of the stars they will buy if elected. The sporting director of the moment will have his own views, as will Messi.

The man overseeing Barcelona’s disastrous transfer policy between 2014 and 2020 was Josep Maria Bartomeu. An amiable chap, he runs a family company that makes the jet bridges that take passengers from plane to terminal. In January 2014, he went from obscure Barça vice-president to accidental president when the incumbent, Sandro Rosell, stepped down. Bartomeu was considered a mere caretaker. However, in July 2015, a month after the win in Berlin, grateful club members gave him a landslide victory in Barça’s presidential elections.

The problem was that he knew little about either football or the football business. His sporting director, the legendary Spanish goalkeeper Andoni “Zubi” Zubizarreta, had signed players like Neymar and Luis Suárez, who gelled with Messi into the “MSN” attack, the best in football. But Bartomeu soon sacked Zubi. In all, the president had five sporting directors in six years.

Barcelona’s descent began with the loss of Neymar. The Brazilian was a hyperefficient winger who ran on to Messi’s passes. Expected goals (xG) is a measure of how many goals a team is likely to score based on its quality of chances. In the 2015/16 season, Neymar by himself accounted for 1.2 xG per game, only slightly behind Messi’s staggering 1.4. But Neymar wanted to be Messi: the main man of his team. In 2017, he joined Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) for a transfer fee of €220m, a world record. Barcelona never managed to replace him.

When a club sells a player for €220m, it doesn’t actually have €220m to spend. There are taxes, agents’ fees and payments by instalment. Still, every other football club in 2017 knew Bartomeu had a wad of money in his back pocket and a need for a human trophy to wave in front of Barça’s 150,000 Neymar-deprived club members.

When I began writing a book about FC Barcelona in 2019, I thought I would be explaining the club’s rise to greatness, and I have. But I have also ended up charting its decline and fall.

Before the pandemic, Barcelona became the first club in any sport ever to surpass $1bn in annual revenues. Now its gross debt is about $1.4bn, much of it short-term.

Spain’s La Liga has blocked it from spending any more money it doesn’t have. Barça has faced obstacles to giving a new contract to the world’s best and ­highest-paid footballer, Lionel Messi, even though he has reportedly agreed to cut his pay by half. The club has put most of its other players in an everything-must-go sale, with few takers so far.

The pandemic hurt, but it was only the coup de grâce. Almost invisibly, Barcelona has been in free fall ever since the night in Berlin in June 2015 when it won its fourth Champions League final in 10 years. The club had achieved dominance on the cheap, thanks to a one-off generation of brilliant footballers from its own youth academy. Back then, Barça could afford to sign almost anybody in football. In any talent business, the most important management decision is recruitment. But Barcelona lost the “war for talent”. What went wrong?

Barça’s process for buying players is unusually messy. Rival currents inside the club each push for different signings, often without bothering to inform the head coach. Candidates for the Barça presidency campaign on promises of the stars they will buy if elected. The sporting director of the moment will have his own views, as will Messi.

The man overseeing Barcelona’s disastrous transfer policy between 2014 and 2020 was Josep Maria Bartomeu. An amiable chap, he runs a family company that makes the jet bridges that take passengers from plane to terminal. In January 2014, he went from obscure Barça vice-president to accidental president when the incumbent, Sandro Rosell, stepped down. Bartomeu was considered a mere caretaker. However, in July 2015, a month after the win in Berlin, grateful club members gave him a landslide victory in Barça’s presidential elections.

The problem was that he knew little about either football or the football business. His sporting director, the legendary Spanish goalkeeper Andoni “Zubi” Zubizarreta, had signed players like Neymar and Luis Suárez, who gelled with Messi into the “MSN” attack, the best in football. But Bartomeu soon sacked Zubi. In all, the president had five sporting directors in six years.

After selling Neymar (1) in 2017, Barça reportedly turns down Kylian Mbappé (2) and signs Ousmane Dembélé (3) instead © Mehdi Taamallah; John Berry; Pedro Salado via Getty Images

Barcelona’s descent began with the loss of Neymar. The Brazilian was a hyperefficient winger who ran on to Messi’s passes. Expected goals (xG) is a measure of how many goals a team is likely to score based on its quality of chances. In the 2015/16 season, Neymar by himself accounted for 1.2 xG per game, only slightly behind Messi’s staggering 1.4. But Neymar wanted to be Messi: the main man of his team. In 2017, he joined Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) for a transfer fee of €220m, a world record. Barcelona never managed to replace him.

When a club sells a player for €220m, it doesn’t actually have €220m to spend. There are taxes, agents’ fees and payments by instalment. Still, every other football club in 2017 knew Bartomeu had a wad of money in his back pocket and a need for a human trophy to wave in front of Barça’s 150,000 Neymar-deprived club members.

Almost any footballer will listen to an offer from Barcelona. “Sometimes you cannot reach an agreement,” Rosell told me, “but everybody sits at the table.”

In 2017, the Spanish agent Junior Minguella offered Barcelona’s board the sensational 18-year-old French forward Kylian Mbappé. But Minguella didn’t even hear back from Barça until finally a WhatsApp message arrived from a board member, Javier Bordas: “Neither the coaches nor Presi [the president] wanted him.”

Bordas would say years later that Barça’s technical staff had also rejected the young Norwegian Erling Braut ­Haaland, because he wasn’t considered “a player in the Barça model”. Today, Mbappé and Haaland are the two most coveted young men in football

Instead Barça targeted another young Frenchman, Borussia Dortmund’s Ousmane Dembélé. Three weeks after Neymar left, Bartomeu and another Barcelona official flew to negotiate — Dembélé’s transfer with their German counterparts in Monte Carlo, a favourite hub of the football business.

The Barça duo landed with a firm resolution, reported The New York Times: they would pay a transfer fee of at most €80m. Anything more and they would walk away. Before walking into the assigned room, the two men hugged.

But in the room, they got a surprise. The Germans said they had no time to chat, had a plane to catch, wouldn’t negotiate and wanted about double Barcelona’s budgeted sum for Dembélé. Bartomeu gave in. After all, he was president of the world’s richest club, and still something of a football virgin. He committed to pay €105m up front, plus €42m in easily obtained performance bonuses — more than Mbappé would have cost.

Not six months later, Barça paid Liverpool €160m for the Brazilian creator Philippe Coutinho. Neymar’s transfer fee had been blown, and more. A transfer fee of more than €100m should be a guarantee against failure, but neither Dembélé nor Coutinho ­succeeded at Barça.

By summer 2020, Barça’s transfer deficit was haunting Bartomeu and his board members. Under the rules that govern Spanish member-owned clubs such as Barça, directors had to repay losses out of their own pockets. The board needed to book profits urgently before the financial year ended on July 1. And so a bizarre swap transfer was concocted. The counterparty was Juventus, also eager to improve its books. Juve “sold” Bosnian midfielder Miralem Pjanic to Barça for a basic fee of €60m, while Barça sold Brazilian midfielder Arthur Melo to Juve for a basic €72m.

These sums would never actually be paid. They were invented for accounting purposes. Under bookkeeping rules, each club could book its handsome supposed selling price as immediate income. The notional payments would be spread out over the years of the players’ contracts. Only €12m in actual money would end up changing hands, the difference between the two players’ fictional prices, paid by Juve to Barça. What mattered was that the swap helped both giants clean up their books.

It was a good deal for Bartomeu’s board, but not for Barça: the ageing squad acquired another 30-year-old in Pjanic, who was soon a fixture on the substitutes’ bench. By last August, after an 8-2 thrashing by Bayern Munich in the Champions League, Barça’s financial crisis became acute. The club needed to offload overpaid older players for whom there was little demand. Suárez, 33, was informed in a one-minute phone call that his services were no longer needed. He joined Atlético. Barcelona continued to pay a portion of his salary.

Bartomeu does deserve credit for signing 17-year-old Pedri from Las Palmas that summer, for an initial fee of just €5m. The boy became a sensation. He shone for Spain in this summer’s European Championship and should play in Saturday’s men’s Olympic football final against Brazil. Still, that success cannot outweigh all Bartomeu’s failures.

Barcelona ended last season third in the Spanish league, its worst performance since 2008. Atlético Madrid won the title, largely thanks to Barça’s gift of Suárez. The Uruguayan scored 21 league goals, and was the striker that Barcelona lacked all season. After scoring the winner in the last match, he sat on the field crying with happiness as he phoned his family. “The way they showed contempt for me at Barcelona at the start of the season,” he had said earlier. “Then Atlético opened all its doors for me.”

This season could be worse for Barça. La Liga has been indicating it will only let the club spend about €160m or €200m on player costs this year, less than a third the amount of three years ago. Barcelona isn’t merely paying unaffordable wages. It’s also still amortising failed transfers of years ago. The club has gone from discount shopping to only signing out-of-contract players who carry no transfer fees at all. Even then, La Liga will only register them to play and re-register Messi if Barça can first slash its wage bill.

Barça has offloaded a few relatively modestly paid reserves, without noticeably denting the wage bill. Fernandes received an email saying his contract was being terminated; he is reportedly taking legal action for unfair dismissal. Barça would love to sell some expensive players, but Dembélé is injured and Coutinho recovering from injury.

The club may end up having to sell its most treasured young players, Pedri and De Jong. Rival big clubs are pitiless. Messi might choose to leave. Barça needed to lower its sights for a while, another senior club official told me, “not try to win every year La Liga or the Champions [League]”. I have sometimes felt I was writing a book about Rome in 400AD with the barbarians already inside the gates.