While the transfer of their star striker, Robert Lewandowski, to Barcelona has been confirmed, Bayern Munich coach Julian Nagelsmann summed up the confusion many others had about the deal.
“It’s the only club in the world that doesn’t have money and then buys all the players it wants. I don’t know how they do it. It’s a little weird, a little crazy,” he said. a lot of new players, not just Robert. “
Nagelsmann’s was reasonable, it was odd that Barcelona could set aside $45 million for a 33-year-old striker despite his difficulties in complying with LaLiga president Javier Tebas’ monetary rules, insisting that the club make significant savings before bringing in someone new.
Everyone saw last summer, a sign of the seriousness with which the president acted, the refusal of the league to let Barcelona sign players until they complied with the rules.
That meant holding on when Barcelona accused the league’s “economic hurdles” of failing to link world icon Lionel Messi to a new contract, a move that ultimately led him to leave for Paris Saint-Germain.
Even when the players were nevertheless registered, the clashes between Thebes and Barcelona continued. This summer, the president has publicly weighed in on the club’s signing plans, noting more recently that until he puts in place some monetary “levers”, the Catalans will not be able to splurge on signatures.
Still, the club has spent over $100 million on new players in the past 6 months, as well as several high-income stars on loose transfers, such as Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.
For the layman, those prices have hardly been compensated, especially given the lousy change of player that the club has made. Selling Phillipe Countinho for just over a tenth of the $169 million Barcelona paid for him or getting a third of the $121 million he paid antoine Griezmann are just two examples among many.
But take a closer look and you’ll find that the economic levers Barcelona pulls to fund signings are similar to player sales.
Last month, he revealed that the club had sold 10% of its LA Liga television rights over the next 25 years to U. S. investment organization Sixth Street for $209 million.
According to a report by the Financial Times, this will be followed by an additional $304 million acquisition of an additional 15%, which a quarter of its national television profits will pass to the company for an extended period.
A capital injection of one billion is surely for a corporate with debts of more than a billion dollars and that still owes many of its star players, such as Frankie De Jong, gigantic sums of the deferred salaries of Covid-19.
The club’s design means it can’t simply sell a stake to investors, such as Manchester City or Manchester United, so Barcelona wants to expand other assets for sale. Broadcast rights, which have remained relatively bulletproof for the past three decades, are an apparent starting point.
LaLiga’s formula of distributing television revenues has made the most productive groups take a much higher percentage compared to their domestic rivals. This allowed Real Madrid and Barcelona to identify a duopoly, sometimes challenged by Atletico Madrid.
This stranglehold on national television revenue is demonstrated most productively by the fact that in the unhappy 2020-21 season, when the club finished third and humiliated 8-2 in the Champions League against Bayern Munich, it still earned around $30 million more than this season. winning names. Athletic.
The profit gap between the more sensible and the butts that year was further accentuated, with the television profits of the lower clubs Huesca and Elche accounting for almost a quarter of those of Barcelona.
It is this asymmetrical distribution of the TV money pot that allows LaLiga’s top productive outfits to compete with Europe’s richest division, the English Premier League, where the gap opened up between Manchester City, which generated the maximum revenue, and Sheffield United for the same was only a third.
LaLiga’s challenge is for their rights to be as sought after as the English competition.
For example, ESPN will pay around $175 million a year to showcase Spanish soccer in the United States, by comparison, the new contract signed through NBC for the Premier League is $450 million consistent with the season.
This is not a trend that turns out to be changing, especially since in the last five years La Liga has lost many of its famous names, such as Neymar, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.
Not that, this summer it has been noticed that the two great aspirants to European football, Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland, opt for transfers to Spain.
The praise of the league being played almost exclusively through Real Madrid and Barcelona was that those two groups had the most productive players in the world, but this is no longer the case.
And the long-term impact of the loss of star strength on broadcast earnings has not been lost on Thebes, who called Lionel Messi’s move to Paris Saint-Germain last year “traumatic. “
“It hurts me that Messi is gone but we are working very hard so that the rights (TV) do fall,” he told Mundo Deportivo after the Argentine’s departure.
If LaLiga’s TV profits rise in the coming decades, the resolve to sell some of them to make money in the coffers probably wouldn’t matter, but if it stabilizes or falls, Barcelona could also struggle.
More fundamentally, the question is whether Barcelona can be smarter, as the sale of Neymar for a world-record $225m in 2017 hit transfers and salaries terribly.
A giant number of high-level players have arrived in Catalonia and most have regressed, aggravating an already delicate situation.
Better decisions will have to be made in terms of cash if Barcelona need to get out of their current situation.
Barcelona enthusiasts will have to pray that Sixth Street’s $500 million injection will be well spent.