Barcelona's Financial Gamble: Bartomeu's Legacy and Laporta's Levers

When Josep Maria Bartomeu finally walked away from the presidency of Barcelona in October 2020, he left behind trophies – and a ruin. Four league titles and a treble in 2014-15 could not mask the reality: Barca were staring at bankruptcy, their image battered, their balance sheet worse.

Bartomeu has never accepted that verdict. To this day, he points to the Covid-19 pandemic as the sole culprit. No fans in Camp Nou, no ticketing, no season tickets, no shop, no museum, no football schools – a collapse in income that, as he told EFE this year, “obviously causes a cash-flow problem that is solved by borrowing,” just like “the vast majority of clubs in Europe.”

But few clubs were hit as hard as Barcelona. And that was no accident.

A billion spent, nothing truly gained

The damage was baked in long before the world shut down. From July 2015, when Bartomeu secured re-election on the back of the treble, to his resignation in October 2020, Barcelona spent just over €1 billion on 29 signings. Not one could be called an unqualified success.

Some were outright disasters. Ousmane Dembele, Philippe Coutinho, Antoine Griezmann – three wildly expensive bets that never delivered anything close to value. Their transfer fees were huge; their salaries were worse. Bartomeu also brushed aside La Liga’s warning that clubs should keep wages below 70 per cent of annual revenue.

“The LFP and UEFA make recommendations but nobody sets a salary cap,” he said then. “We are above what is recommended but the important thing is to be sustainable. We can afford it.”

They couldn’t. Not when the pandemic hit, and certainly not after.

Barcelona were left with an ageing squad on colossal contracts, players who could not be shifted for meaningful fees. When Joan Laporta returned as president in March 2021, the mess was so severe he felt compelled to do the unthinkable: let Lionel Messi, the club’s greatest ever player and by far its highest earner, leave for nothing when his deal expired that summer.

“I did what I had to do,” Laporta told El Pais earlier this year. Messi was nearing the end of his career, Laporta argued, and the club needed a new team. He would have liked to build that new side around Messi. He tried. It wasn’t possible.

Messi’s exit, though, was only the beginning. The hole was deeper than most outsiders realised, and Laporta had to choose a path.

The levers: mortgaging tomorrow to survive today

“Laporta basically had two options,” explains Marc Menchen Alba, CEO of Barcelona-based sports business firm 2Playbook. One route: slash the wage bill, sell aggressively, accept a sharp drop in competitiveness and “travel through the footballing wilderness for two or three years.”

The other: raise money fast by selling off future assets. Sacrifice tomorrow’s income to win again today.

Laporta chose the gamble.

In the summer of 2022, Barcelona pulled their most famous “economic lever”, selling 25 per cent of their La Liga TV rights for the next 25 years to Sixth Street for €582m. It was the headline deal in a series of asset sales designed to plug immediate deficits.

In simple terms, Barca mortgaged a chunk of their future revenue so they could compete in the present. Short-term glory in the hope it would spark a long-term recovery.

“I remember thinking at the time, this is a bold move,” Menchen recalls. “But I didn’t like it because I thought there were safer ways to go about it.”

On the pitch, the initial payoff looked impressive. With the money unlocked by the levers, Barcelona spent heavily in the summer of 2022. Robert Lewandowski arrived from Julian Nagelsmann’s Bayern Munich for €45m. Raphinha and Jules Kounde followed for a combined €108m.

By the end of the season, Barcelona were champions of Spain again, winning La Liga for the first time in four years. The bet, at least in sporting terms, had worked.

The cost came later.

“Laporta’s high-risk move led to Barca suffering nearly every summer,” Menchen says. Each window became a cliffhanger: could the club register their new signings under La Liga’s financial controls? The summer of 2024 was particularly fraught.

And patience outside the boardroom snapped.

Fans turn on Laporta and the ‘levers’

The mood around Camp Nou – and around its endless redevelopment – grew toxic. The breaking point for many came with the Dani Olmo saga, when Barcelona’s pursuit of the Spain international fizzled out amid financial constraints. For a significant portion of the fanbase, Laporta’s levers had become a symbol of broken promises.

Fan group Som un Clam delivered a blistering statement.

“The situation created is inadmissible, and the damage caused to the reputation of the entity is irreparable,” they wrote. They accused the board of “continuous lies” and “deception of members with false promises that are never fulfilled and that end up harming the Club.”

In their view, the levers had “decapitalised” FC Barcelona’s assets in just four years, selling off strategic future income to patch holes born of “chaotic and improvised management.” They argued that, despite talk of recovery, the club still lacked a solid medium- or long-term financial strategy.

Som un Clam demanded an end to improvisation and what they called irresponsible asset sales “mortgaging the model of collective ownership that makes us unique.” They called for Laporta and the entire board to resign, and urged socios and fans to mobilise to “reverse this situation.”

The warning was stark: the club’s heritage and ownership model were at risk. The vicious circle of financial manoeuvres, they argued, endangered Barca’s very identity.

Yet Laporta survived. No vote of no confidence, no immediate overthrow. The storm raged, then slowly began to ease.

La Masia, pure profit and a quieter rebuild

Eighteen months on, the landscape looks very different. The noise has not disappeared, but the panic has.

Barcelona’s transfer strategy has calmed. Last season they made just one significant signing, goalkeeper Joan Garcia, activated via a €25m release clause from Espanyol. It was a targeted move, not another headline-grabbing spree.

At the same time, the club finally began to exploit one of its greatest assets properly: La Masia.

Barca sold a string of academy products, many of whom had barely featured for the first team, for substantial fees. Because they cost nothing to develop in accounting terms, every euro banked counted as pure profit.

“You can see with the likes of Lamine Yamal and Pau Cubarsi just how important La Masia is to Barcelona in terms of producing players for the senior squad,” Menchen notes. Homegrown players arrive knowing the positional play, the patterns, the demands. That cuts the need for big transfer fees.

But La Masia is now also a financial engine. “Very significantly, over the past few windows, we’ve seen Barca do really well in terms of the sale of academy graduates,” Menchen says. In the past, many left for free because there was no space for them in the first team. Now, 18- and 19-year-olds that most fans barely know are leaving for €5m or €10m.

Those deals are not glamorous, but they matter. They help meet budgetary requirements and ease the strain that once forced Barca into those dramatic levers.

Real Madrid are doing something similar with La Fabrica, Menchen points out. The European champions have sold several academy products to help finance moves for players such as Yan Diomande. Both Spanish giants pour €20-30m a year into their academies – and both are now reaping the rewards.

Big outlay, but a different kind of pressure

This summer, Barcelona have again spent heavily, creating a large net outlay in the market. Yet the exits have been just as significant.

Paris Saint-Germain paid €48.5m for Ferran Torres. Lewandowski left on a free, but removing his salary from the books was a major relief. Liverpool agreed to cover Ronald Araujo’s entire wage during his loan spell at Anfield, another crucial saving on the payroll.

Those moves have given Barca some breathing room. Enough, perhaps, to dream of one more marquee arrival.

Could Julian Alvarez be the man to replace Lewandowski’s goals? For now, Menchen is sceptical. The margins remain tight. But one more big academy sale could change the equation.

“You always have to remember that this is a cash-flow business,” he explains. Sell Marc Casado, for example, for €30m, and you could effectively cover Alvarez’s cost for this season. Transfer fees are amortised, spread over the length of a contract, while the sale of an academy player drops in as immediate profit.

That kind of deal, combined with the looming completion of the new Camp Nou and a rebound in tourism – and with it, museum and matchday revenue – could transform Barca’s financial outlook.

“Barca will probably be able to operate with complete financial freedom next summer for the first time since before the pandemic,” Menchen predicts.

The levers fade, the questions remain

So, are Barcelona finally out of danger?

“They are for now,” Menchen says. The club still pays around €40m a year to Sixth Street for those Liga rights. In the context of annual revenues pushing €1bn, that figure is not catastrophic. But in elite football, small margins decide big transfers. That €40m could be the difference in a straight fight with Real Madrid for a star signing.

Even so, Menchen believes the worst is over. “I do think we are seeing the beginning of the end of Barca’s most serious financial problems,” he says. Laporta made a high-risk call, the kind of decision that sometimes defines a presidency. With time, he may feel vindicated, especially with Barcelona having won three of the last four La Liga titles.

There is still room for criticism. Menchen argues that tighter control on spending and avoiding some of the signings Laporta did make could have saved money and perhaps removed the need to sell off future TV rights at all.

The long-term impact of those choices is still unknown. The levers will echo through Barca’s accounts for years. But the club, for the first time in a long time, no longer looks like it needs another emergency pull.

For a giant that spent too many seasons run in what Menchen calls a “weird and crazy” manner, that alone marks a profound shift. The real test now is simple: can Barcelona resist the temptation to gamble again when the next crisis comes?