Barcelona's Financial Crisis: Bartomeu to Laporta's Gamble
When Josep Maria Bartomeu finally walked away from the presidency of Barcelona in October 2020, he did not leave as a man who had simply run his course. He left as the face of a club in chaos, a giant staggering under the weight of its own excesses.
On paper, his record looked defendable: four La Liga titles and a treble in 2014-15. In reality, he left Barça teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, with a bloated wage bill, a distorted squad and a business model that collapsed the moment the world shut down.
Bartomeu still insists the pandemic is to blame. No fans, no ticketing, no season tickets, no shop, no museum, no football schools – he has repeated the list of lost income often, arguing that borrowing to bridge the gap was standard practice across Europe. The problem is that very few clubs were as exposed as Barcelona when Covid hit, and that vulnerability was his legacy.
Between his re-election in July 2015 and his resignation in October 2020, Barça spent just over €1 billion on 29 signings. Not one turned into an unqualified success. Several became symbols of waste. Ousmane Dembele, Philippe Coutinho, Antoine Griezmann – three enormous bets that never truly paid off, but did help drive the wage bill into dangerous territory.
La Liga had advised clubs not to let salaries climb above 70% of annual revenue. Bartomeu shrugged. The league and UEFA, he said, could only recommend, not impose. “We can afford it,” he insisted. Barcelona could not. Not when the stadium closed, the tourists vanished and the TV money suddenly had to carry everything.
When Joan Laporta returned to the presidency in March 2021, he inherited a squad full of ageing, highly paid players who were almost impossible to move on. The most painful consequence came that summer, when Lionel Messi, the club’s highest earner by a distance, walked away at the end of his contract because Barça simply could not make the numbers work.
Laporta has never apologised for that decision. He has framed it as a necessary break with the past, a brutal but unavoidable step towards building a new team. Messi, he argued, was nearing the end of his career. The club needed oxygen.
Yet stripping out Messi’s salary didn’t magically fix anything. The financial problems were deeper, structural, and Laporta quickly reached a fork in the road.
As Marc Menchen Alba, CEO of Barcelona-based 2Playbook, explains, Laporta essentially had two choices. He could slash the wage bill, sell aggressively, accept a sharp drop in competitiveness and wander through the wilderness for two or three seasons. Or he could try to claw in as much money as possible, as fast as possible, by selling off future assets to remain competitive immediately.
Laporta chose the gamble.
The summer of 2022 became the summer of the “levers”. The most dramatic: the sale of 25% of Barça’s La Liga broadcasting rights for the next 25 years to investment firm Sixth Street, raising €582m. It was a massive, long-term commitment dressed up as a short-term lifeline.
In simple terms, Laporta mortgaged future income to plug current holes, convinced that winning now would speed up the recovery later. Menchen remembers thinking it was bold, but also believing there were safer, less extreme ways to proceed.
On the pitch, the early returns gave Laporta cover. Barcelona signed Robert Lewandowski from Bayern Munich for €45m, and added Raphinha and Jules Kounde for a combined €108m. That spending spree, powered by the levers, ended with the club lifting La Liga in 2022-23, their first league title in four years.
But the bill for that strategy arrived every summer. Registration sagas became an annual drama. Could Barça fit their new signings under La Liga’s financial rules? Would players have to be sold at the last minute? The margin for error vanished.
The summer of 2024 was especially fraught. Transfer frustrations piled up, and the failed pursuit of Dani Olmo pushed supporters to the limit. The mood turned poisonous.
Fan group Som un Clam went public with a blistering statement. They called the situation “inadmissible” and the damage to the club’s reputation “irreparable”. They accused the board of lies, false promises and chaotic, improvised management. In their eyes, the levers had “decapitalised” the club, stripping away strategic assets to cover self-inflicted holes.
They argued that, despite constant talk of recovery, Barcelona still lacked a serious medium- or long-term plan. They demanded an end to improvisation and the sale of assets that, in their view, threatened the club’s unique model of collective ownership. They called for Laporta and his board to resign and urged fans to mobilise.
It was a brutal verdict on an administration that had staked everything on immediate success.
Yet Laporta survived that storm. Eighteen months on, the picture looks very different.
Barça stepped away from the transfer-market fireworks. Last season they made just one major signing, goalkeeper Joan Garcia, and even that came at a relatively modest €25m, thanks to his release clause at Espanyol. At the same time, they cashed in on a string of players, many of them La Masia products, generating almost twice Garcia’s fee in pure profit.
This is where the club’s academy has reasserted its importance – not just as a talent pipeline for the first team, but as a financial engine. Lamine Yamal and Pau Cubarsi are the headline acts, proof that La Masia can still produce players ready to step straight into the senior side and reduce the need for big-money signings.
But the less glamorous business has been just as significant. As Menchen notes, Barcelona have become far more efficient at monetising academy graduates who do not make it at Camp Nou. In the past, many of these youngsters left for nothing, victims of a logjam in the first team. Now, 18- and 19-year-olds barely known to the wider fanbase are being sold for €5m or €10m, deals that count as pure profit and help meet budgetary targets.
Real Madrid have done something similar with La Fabrica, turning academy sales into a funding source for major arrivals like Yan Diomande. Both Spanish giants invest heavily – €20m to €30m a year – in their academies. This summer, those investments have paid off.
Barcelona have still spent heavily in this window, and the overall net spend remains high. But they have also pulled off key exits. Convincing Paris Saint-Germain to pay €48.5m for Ferran Torres was a major win. Letting Lewandowski leave on a free removed a huge salary from the books. Liverpool’s decision to cover Ronald Araujo’s entire wage during his loan at Anfield further eased the pressure on the payroll.
That has opened up a tantalising possibility: could Barça move for Julian Alvarez to replace Lewandowski’s goals? Menchen is cautious. As it stands, he doesn’t see the numbers clearly adding up. But he also points out how quickly things can change with one more academy sale.
Sell someone like Marc Casado for €30m, he explains, and the club could effectively cover Alvarez’s cost for this season. Transfer fees are amortised – spread across the length of the contract – so a single, high-margin sale can unlock a major signing.
Beyond the transfer market, the structural picture is also improving. The eventual completion of the new Camp Nou, combined with a rebound in tourism and museum revenue, should significantly boost income. Menchen believes that, as early as next summer, Barcelona could finally operate with full financial freedom for the first time since before the pandemic.
Are the financial problems over? For now, Menchen says, yes – with one lingering concern. Barça still pay around €40m a year to Sixth Street for those Liga rights. In isolation, that figure doesn’t look catastrophic for a club with annual revenues near €1bn. But football at this level is a game of fine margins. That €40m could be the difference in a transfer battle with Real Madrid.
Even so, he sees “the beginning of the end” of Barça’s most severe financial crisis. Laporta’s high-risk bet, the decision to mortgage part of the future to stabilise the present, looks more defensible with each passing season and each trophy. Three league titles in four years would strengthen his argument that the gamble was justified.
Menchen still believes the club could have avoided some of the more questionable deals under Laporta, saved money and perhaps escaped the need to sell future TV rights at all. Those choices will be debated for years.
What is clear now is that Barcelona no longer live under the constant threat of having to pull another lever just to breathe. For a club that spent too long lurching from one wild decision to the next, that alone feels like a revolution.
