Barca’s €120m lifeline before La Liga start: Levers are back (but not as we know them)
Just two days before Barcelona begin their La Liga title defence, the club have only 12 first-team squad members eligible to play in the competition — and one of them, Ousmane Dembele, is about to join Paris Saint-Germain.
Financial struggles have left Barca unable to register the three new signings they have made this summer — Inigo Martinez, Ilkay Gundogan and Oriol Romeu. They have not managed to register new contracts agreed with key players such as Ronald Araujo, Sergi Roberto or Marcos Alonso, either.
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This is because they are currently in breach of La Liga’s rules on salary limits — but Barca hope a new financial arrangement announced on Friday will help solve that and allow them to register at least some of these key players in time for Sunday’s season-opener at Getafe.
La Liga calculates a maximum spend on wages for each team according to a club’s revenue and Barca have been spending more than they are allowed. La Liga president Javier Tebas said in the spring that they needed to cut about €200million (£171m; $221m) from their wage bill to comply with the rules.
As we will see in this article, some progress was made towards that, with high-earners such as Jordi Alba and Sergio Busquets leaving the club this summer, but in July, Barca suffered another blow as La Liga cut a further €60million from their wage budget for 2023-24 because of a shortfall in projected revenue equal to that sum.
Now the Spanish champions say they have covered that ‘missing’ €60million thanks to a deal the club announced on Friday. It’s a complicated picture, so allow us to explain.
Spoiler alert: ‘levers’ are involved, but not necessarily how you might expect…
Two of the financial ‘levers’ pulled by Barca last summer were to sell
Read on theathletic.com
