Barcelona’s financial crisis. How the Catalans got into debt or the President is not the owner

Barcelona and the financial crisis, that’s a well-known thing nowadays. But how did one of the biggest clubs in the world with huge revenues get into it in the first place? It all started with former owner Josep Maria Bartomeo.

Spain has a slightly different structure to clubs in England, for example. A club is not owned by one owner who can pump unlimited funds into it and do what he wants with it without having to ask anyone.

That’s how it works with the Sheiks at Manchester City or PSG, for example, or earlier with Roman Abramovich, or now with Todd Boehly at Chelsea, or the Glazers at Manchester United.

Barcelona, Real Madrid, Sevilla, Atlético Madrid, Athletic and several other clubs have members called socios at the top. The club is headed by a president who must first collect a few votes and then win an election. It actually works like an ordinary election for head of state.

The president is elected for 4 years and that is the pain of Barcelona. In order to get into office, the president has to make a lot of promises to the socios and fans in the elections, which are then not exactly easy to keep.

For example, Florentino Pérez, before his first election at the beginning of the 21st century, promised to bring Barcelona captain Figo to Real Madrid. In the end, he did, but the difference is that Pérez is an excellent businessman who looks at the economic side of the club first.

Let the flood come after us

Barcelona didn’t have presidents like this. Former president Sandro Rosell had already started a crisis at Barcelona, and on leaving he was also investigated for money laundering and tax evasion.

And in 2014, Josep Maria Bartomeu stepped in. And then came perhaps the blackest period in Barcelona’s history. Bartomeu’s attitude was “let the flood come after us, I’m not going to be here anymore”.

Bartomeu promised great success, but it never came. Real Madrid won one Champions League after another and the Barcelona president tried to solve it with expensive purchases. Moreover, he will forever be remembered as the president who lost Neymar.

And how did he spend the money for the record-breaking transfer? he sent €117 million to Dortmund for Dembélé, €135 million to Liverpool for Coutinho and the money was gone.

The swap where he sent 23-year-old Arturo to Juventus and brought 30-year-old Miralem Pjanic instead was also much questioned.

At the same time, Bartomeu was a godsend for Barcelona players. He was giving out gigantic contracts that were not compatible with the salary cap, but that didn’t bother Bartomeu because he knew that this problem would no longer be solved by him, but by the president after him.

So he gave Lionel Messi the biggest contract in the history of sport at the time – 555 million euros for four years. That amounts to 138 million euros per season. This gigantic contract pretty much strangled Barcelona was one of the reasons why Messi had to leave in the summer of 2021.

For Messi, as one of the best players in history, a luxury contract would be even more understandable. But Jordi Alba, Sergio Busquets, Gerard Piqué, Sergi Roberto, Coutinho and Antoine Griezmann were also given totally overpriced contracts.

In a recent interview, Isco let it be known that he too received an offer from Barcelona back then. “Yes, I received an offer from Barcelona in 2018. And with what Bartomeu was giving out for contracts back then… I would have had twice as much as at Real. But I didn’t want to leave Madrid,” Isco told MARCA newspaper in July.

But contracts were not Bartomeu’s only problem. In fact, the Barcelona president used club money to pay an outside firm to create accounts and write hateful comments against the club’s presidential candidates. Bartomeu paid millions of euros for these services.

Bartomeu eventually left Barcelona in 2020 with a debt of 1.3 billion euros. The Golazo podcast covered the financial problems in more detail.

Source: Golazo