It is behind a pay wall. Could you post the entire article please?
?Barca is the top sporting brand in the world,? Barcelona president Josep Maria Bartomeu proudly told a group of distinguished Catalan politicians and businessmen on February 12. ?We?ve had our difficult moments. But this year our revenues will pass the ?1 billion mark. Great work has been done by all.?
Six weeks later, on March 26, the world?s wealthiest sporting institution humbly applied to use a Spanish government scheme for enforcing emergency pay-cuts and lay-offs, after all sporting and business activities ceased due to the coronavirus pandemic.
This shocked the club?s roughly 1,500 ?ordinary? employees, from youth coaches, scouts and physios, through to staff at the club?s museum, restaurants and retail outlets.
But few expected the angriest reaction to come from Barca?s best-paid staff member, with first-team captain Lionel Messi issuing an angry statement via his own Instagram account criticising not the measure itself, but the way it had been sold through the local media.
Upset that Catalan sports papers had been claiming Barca?s ?captains? had been selfishly rejecting any pay-cuts, Messi voiced his ?surprise that inside the club there would be people who want to pressure us into doing something we were always clear we wanted to do?.
The kicker was that Messi said he and his team-mates were going to dip into their own pockets to ensure ?that all the club?s employees can earn 100% of their salaries for as long as this situation lasts?.
That effectively reversed the board?s decision to enforce pay-cuts and removed control of the club?s policies from Bartomeu and his board in this most difficult moment.
So how did the richest team in football get to the point where its own players were bailing out the directors?
Answering that question requires a trip back through the often complex finances and relationship between the Camp Nou?s boardroom and dressing room.
Back in summer 2008, around the time Messi was just beginning to establish himself as world class, Barca was a very different club. A fourth contract renewal in three years saw the forward replace departing team-mate Ronaldinho as the team?s best-paid member, a few weeks after his 21st birthday. Annual club revenues totalled ?279 million, with player wages totalling ?160 million, far healthier than the 70% ratio used by many within the game as a yardstick for sustainability.
Two years later, Messi was world football?s biggest earner on ?9.2 million a year, before bonuses, while bumper contracts also persuaded peers including Xavi Hernandez and Andres Iniesta to stay at home as Pep Guardiola?s team swept all before them, including an historic treble of Champions League, La Liga and Copa del Rey trophies.
Barca had been spending outside their means, however, and when Joan Laporta left as president in 2010, the club?s net debts were revealed as ?379 million. Successor Sandro Rosell loudly made sorting out the finances a key objective. New economic vice-president Javier Faus, a very successful private equity investor by trade, led an ?austerity? project. One cost-cutting measure was banning colour photocopying at all Camp Nou offices.
As you can see below, revenues rose sharply, helped by innovations such as the controversial sponsorship agreement with Qatar. Total expenditure levelled off for a couple of years, as did spending on player salaries, even after new high-earner Neymar arrived from Santos in 2013.
barcelona-messi-money
?When we took control, the president mandated that we professionalise the club,? Faus said in October 2013. New measures included adding a club statute (Article 67) mandating that the leadership must resign if debts were twice EBITDA (earnings before taxes, interest, depreciation and amortisation) in two successive years.
Words like ?austerity? and ?sustainability? impressed readers of the annual club accounts. But the players began to chafe against what they saw as unfair restraints on their pay. A petty legal case taken by Rosell and then vice-president Bartomeu against their previous colleague Laporta also damaged their relationships with Guardiola, Xavi and Messi, who had remained close to their former boss.
A storm was coming and it broke in December 2013. Amid familiar local media stories of Jorge Messi requesting another significant pay-bump for his son, Faus complained in a radio interview that there was no need to offer pay-rises to their No 10 ?every six months?.
Messi did not often speak in public at that point, but he responded almost immediately: ?Mister Faus knows nothing about football and wants to run Barca like a business, which it is not. Barca is the best team in the world and deserves the best directors.?
Faus? faux-pas signalled his end at the club and, the following June, Messi agreed a new deal roughly doubling his wages to ?39.5 million gross per season.
Messi surely felt he was worth the money, especially as nemesis Cristiano Ronaldo was earning something similar at Real Madrid. And the Argentine?s fame and exploits also clearly helped Barca?s revenues rise dramatically year after year. A problem, though, was that his rocketing annual wage provided an elevated ceiling up to which everyone else could negotiate.
Summer 2014 also saw Luis Suarez join Messi and Neymar in attack. The next season saw the team win another treble. That year?s accounts included payments to players and staff rising by over ?88 million and the club?s debts increasing for the first time since Laporta left.
?The money is out on the pitch,? Faus? replacement Susana Monje explained at the club?s AGM in October 2015.
When Monje left citing personal reasons the following year, Bartomeu took on the economic VP?s duties as well. The trope ?Bartomeu takes the reins? became a favourite of local headline writers, especially for stories around new contracts or transfers. Some saw this as strong leadership from the top, others as the players being allowed to bypass the club?s various levels of negotiating expertise.
A rotating door of different sporting and technical directors, especially after Andoni Zubizarreta was fired in January 2015, also cleared a direct path from the dressing room to the president?s door.
Sergio Busquets spent much of 2016 hinting publicly that he might join Guardiola at City if Bartomeu broke a promise to significantly raise his salary. ?I hope the president keeps his word,? Busquets said that February. Talks dragged on before the midfielder eventually signed a new deal that September, worth a reported ?12.3 million a year.
Contract talks with Iniesta, now coming towards the end of his career, dragged through 2017. In June, the midfielder, usually exceedingly polite, emphatically denied a claim by Bartomeu that an agreement had already been reached. That October he did sign a new deal, but senior players had learned that publicly confronting Bartomeu could secure a salary ?update?, and Gerard Pique and Jordi Alba were among others to follow suit.
It also became public knowledge that the players had jokingly nicknamed the president ?Nobita?, after a bespectacled 10-year-old character in Japanese children?s show ?Doraemon?. Bartomeu took it in good humour, telling Barca TV that ?I suppose I look rather like him?. The president also added, ?At Barca, we have a Doraemon in Messi, who can resolve all our difficult situations. And if there?s a Doraemon, there must be a Nobita, too.?
bartomeu-barcelona
Amid all the fun and games, Barca?s 2017-18 accounts saw football salaries rise from ?342 million to ?457 million. The announcement came just as Messi leveraged new apparent interest from Guardiola?s City into a deal worth more than ?70 million per year, helping him become the world?s best-paid athlete.
All this saw Barca also become the highest-paying team in any global sport, with each player making an average of over ?10.4 million per season, per Sporting Intelligence?s 2018 Global Sports Salaries Survey. They still have that No 1 ranking, although the average amount dipped slightly last year to ?9,827,644, with Madrid second on ?8.9m, Juventus third, followed mostly by NBA teams until the first Premier League side ? Manchester City (13th, at ?7 million).
Many Barca fans and pundits thought this just made sense as they had the world?s best player in their squad. Bartomeu and his fellow directors were unruffled as the club?s revenues continued to rocket, too. Net debts were also slowly falling, even after the 2018 confirmation of a ?572 million remodelling of the Camp Nou.
Last January, the club?s website happily headlined a story ?Barca tops Deloitte?s Football Money League for the first time?. Soon afterwards, Bartomeu boasted of the ?1 billion turnover to the Catalan industrialists. That seems a long time ago now.
Last week, Bartomeu had to deny that Barca would have been in danger of declaring bankruptcy within three months if the emergency pay-cuts had not been implemented.
?Up to February we had a faster pace of income than expected, the fastest in history,? he told Radio Catalunya. ?Now it has all just stopped, which is why we are making these cuts. If we had done nothing before June, we would not have gone bankrupt. But there would have been losses.?
The tone was much more sober than before, understandably. Some sympathy is possible as nobody could have foreseen all football and most of society shutting down so abruptly. Also, while Barca were the first La Liga club to publicly announce pay-cuts, on Friday the league itself asked all Spain?s professional teams to follow suit.
But it is not as if there were no previous signs of financial stresses at the Camp Nou. While revenues and costs have raced each other towards the historic billion mark, the board have been scrambling each season to make ends meet. Last summer they had to borrow the entire ?105 million to pay Antoine Griezmann?s release clause, while failed attempts to offload high earners like Ivan Rakitic further ruffled dressing-room feathers.
Barca?s 2019-20 budget needs ?109 million income from player trading to balance the books. Should this summer?s transfer window not open as planned, there will be a huge hole in this year?s accounts. Which brings back Faus? famous Article 67, and the threat of the entire board having to resign should debts mount too far.
Meanwhile the current crisis hit just after Messi?s Instagram dressing-down of sporting director Eric Abidal, who had publicly blamed the players for January?s decision to fire Ernesto Valverde as coach. A phrase from that post ? ?I think everyone has to take responsibility for their own duties and the decisions they take? ? was clearly not just aimed at Abidal.
All this has led to a situation where the club has little money and its players have lots. Bartomeu and his fellow directors have lost control. Messi is now all-powerful at the Camp Nou. Even the kitman and security guards directly count on his generosity for their monthly pay-cheques.
We are also approaching the usual time when Messi?s contract needs an ?update?. And everyone at the Camp Nou knows that his current deal includes a clause allowing him to unilaterally leave this June, when he turns 33. This has led to fears, not just among fans, that he could really move on, considering how sour everything has turned through recent months.
However, it is impossible to imagine that Messi, having taken the whole club on his shoulders, could now just up and leave. More likely is that Barca?s senior players try to use their current leverage to bring about deep structural changes in how the club is run.
Which brings us back to that famous 2013 argument. Faus? view of Barca as a business which must follow the usual accounting rules has not survived these current extraordinary circumstances. Messi?s response that Barca deserves the best directors remains truer than ever.
new stadium won’t have helped but still