How Barcelona blew a fortune – and got worse

Before the pandemic, Barcelona became the first club in any sport ever to surpass US$1 billion (S$1.36 billion) in annual revenues. Now the Spanish football giant’s gross debt is about US$1.4 billion, much of it short term.

La Liga has blocked it from spending any more money it does not have. Barca faced obstacles in giving a new contract to the world’s best and highest-paid footballer, Lionel Messi, even though he 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 grace. Almost invisibly, Barcelona has been in free fall ever since June 2015, when the team won their 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 their own youth academy. Back then, Barca 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?

Barca’s process for buying players is messy. Rival currents inside the club each push for different signings, often without bothering to inform the head coach. Candidates for the Barca 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 last year was Josep Maria Bartomeu. In January 2014, he went from obscure Barca 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 Champions League win, grateful club members gave him a landslide victory in Barca’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 Suarez, who gelled with Messi into the “MSN” attack, the best in football.

But Bartomeu soon sacked Zubi. In all, he had five sporting directors in six years.

Barcelona’s descent began with the loss of Neymar. The Brazilian was a hyper-efficient winger who ran on to Messi’s passes. 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 €222 million (S$353.7 million), a world record. Barcelona never managed to replace him.

When a club sells a player for €222 million, it does not actually have €222 million 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 and a need for a human trophy to wave in front of Barca’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 Mbappe. But Barca did not want him.

Board member Javier Bordas later said Barca’s technical staff had also rejected the young Norwegian Erling Haaland, because he was not considered “a player in the Barca model”.

Today, Mbappe and Haaland are the two most-coveted young men in football. Instead Barca targeted another young Frenchman, Borussia Dortmund’s Ousmane Dembele.

Bartomeu and another Barcelona official had initially planned to pay a transfer fee of at most €80 million.

But the Germans wanted about double Barcelona’s budgeted sum. Bartomeu gave in. He committed to pay €105 million up front, plus €42 million in easily obtained performance bonuses – more than Mbappe would have cost.

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

Some of this may be due to the anxiety inherent in joining this club. Many potential signings feel they are not good enough for Barca. These men are experiencing possibly justified impostor syndrome. Rosell said: “Sometimes an agent comes and says, ‘No, no, no, we are not ready’. This is very honest. I liked it when it happened to me.” Bartomeu told me of similar rejections from “very important players now playing in other clubs”.

In 2019, Barcelona paid Ajax Amsterdam a transfer fee of €75 million for young midfielder Frenkie de Jong. According to football agent Hasan Cetinkaya, advising the Dutch club, this was nearly double what Ajax had initially hoped to get. Cetinkaya said: “There was tremendous pressure on Barcelona’s sporting management to get the deal done… Barcelona’s sporting leadership were so relieved that the then-sporting director Pep Segura began crying as soon as the papers were written.”

Barca was used to overpaying. Whereas most clubs target a type – say, a young playmaker who costs under €30 million – Barcelona until last year shopped at the top of the market, and could afford to target an ideal. In this case, Barca did not want a “De Jong type”. It wanted de Jong himself.

As so often when bidding for a player, it had no alternative in mind, and the selling club understood this. “You know you will pay more than another club,” shrugged Rosell.

In early summer 2019, Neymar messaged Messi to say he wanted to leave PSG. Messi saw the chance to repair Barcelona’s mistake of 2017. He summoned Bartomeu and let him know. Messi made the same case in the media, putting pressure on the club.

But Barca took one look at the injury-prone, fun-loving, then 27-year-old Neymar and decided it was not going to pay PSG’s asking fee of approximately €200 million. By this time, Barcelona was running out of money, partly because of its run of bad purchases and partly because the pay rises Messi’s father Jorge kept extracting for his son were bleeding the club dry.

Between 2017 and this year, Messi earned a total of more than €555 million, according to extracts from his 30-page contract published in El Mundo newspaper. Neither Messi nor senior Barcelona officials denied the figure. One senior official told me Messi’s salary had tripled between 2014 and last year. But he added: “Messi is not the problem. The problem is the contagion of the rest of the team.” Whenever Messi got a raise, his teammates wanted one too. Messi’s salary finally made it impossible for Barcelona to buy the player Messi most wanted.

Instead, Barcelona paid Atletico Madrid €120 million for Antoine Griezmann in 2019, the 28-year-old Frenchman. It was a record fee for a footballer older than 25. It also enriched Atletico over and above the peculiar arrangement of Barca paying the Madrilenos millions a year for “first refusal” on its players.

Barca’s pursuit of Neymar does not seem to have fooled Messi. Asked if the club had done everything possible to get the Brazilian, he replied: “I don’t know? Not everything is very clear.” Asked if he ran the club, he issued his usual denial: “Obviously I don’t direct things, I’m just another player.”

A club staff member who has worked with Messi since before his first-team debut in 2004 disagrees. “He’s calling the shots,” this man told me. “He knows he can take out anyone. He’s not looking for fights – he’s a nice guy. But he knows he has the power.”

When Messi lost a battle, the staff member said, he would say nothing but metaphorically “write it down in his notebook”.

The failure to buy Neymar was Messi’s biggest defeat inside Barca and it went into his mental notebook. He could not forgive Bartomeu. Messi did not particularly want power. He would have preferred that the directors and coaches handled everything – but only as long as they bought exactly the players he wanted.

Players who join Barcelona have often been the stars of every team they have played for since age six. At Barca, they become water carriers for Messi. The drop in status was hard for a veteran star like Griezmann, especially when, for the first time in his career, he was benched. He rarely reached his best at Barca.

In total, Barcelona spent over €1 billion on transfers between 2014 and 2019, more than any other football club, yet as veteran defender Gerard Pique admitted: “Every year we were a little bit worse.” By January last year, when Barca needed a striker to replace the injured Suarez, the club was reduced to discount shopping, looking at the likes of Cedric Bakambu, a French-Congolese forward at Beijing Guoan and the Dane Martin Braithwaite, who had flopped at Middlesbrough in the English Championship but whom it eventually signed.

Yet the strangest purchase of the Bartomeu era was Matheus Fernandes, an unknown 21-year-old reserve midfielder from the Brazilian club Palmeiras. The transfer fee was €7 million, plus €3 million in potential add-ons. Last season, “the Brazilian Phantom” played 17 minutes for the first team. Nobody could work out why Barca had bought him in January last year.

By last summer, Barca’s transfer deficit was haunting Bartomeu and his board members. Under the rules that govern Spanish member-owned clubs such as Barca, directors had to repay losses out of their own pockets. The board needed to book profits urgently before the financial year ended on June 30, 2020.

And so a bizarre swop transfer was concocted. The counterparty was Juventus, also eager to improve its books. Juve “sold” Bosnian midfielder Miralem Pjanic to Barca for a basic fee of €60 million, while Barca sold Brazilian midfielder Arthur Melo to Juve for a basic €72 million.

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 €12 million in actual money would end up changing hands, the difference between the two players’ fictional prices, paid by Juve. What mattered was the swop helped both clean up their books.

It was a good deal for Bartomeu’s board, but not for Barca: 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, Barca’s financial crisis became acute. The club needed to offload overpaid older players for whom there was little demand. Suarez, 33, was informed in a one-minute phone call that his services were no longer needed. He joined Atletico. 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 €5 million. He shone for Spain in this summer’s European Championship and played in Saturday’s Olympic football final against Brazil. Still, that success cannot outweigh all Bartomeu’s failures.

Barcelona ended last season third in the Spanish league, the team’s worst performance since 2008. Atletico won the title, largely thanks to Barca’s gift of Suarez. The Uruguayan scored 21 league goals, and was the striker that Barcelona lacked all season.

This season could be worse for Barca. La Liga has been indicating it will only let the club spend about €160 million or €200 million on player costs this year, less than a third the amount of three years ago. Barca is not merely paying unaffordable wages. It is 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 if Barca can first slash its wage bill.

Barca has offloaded a few relatively modestly paid reserves, without noticeably denting the wage bill. Fernandes received an e-mail saying his contract was being terminated; he is reportedly taking legal action for unfair dismissal. Barca would love to sell some expensive players, but Dembele is injured and Coutinho is 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. Barca 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 AD400 with the barbarians already inside the gates. FINANCIAL TIMES

• Simon Kuper is an FT columnist. This is an edited extract from his book Barca: The Inside Story Of The World’s Greatest Football Club, which will be published tomorrow by Short Books.

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