Barcelona FC and Their Debt: Més Que Un Mil Milions
Barcelona FC is a soccer team that is famous for its history, culture, and tradition. Unfortunately, the team may soon become history itself.
This is because of incredibly misguided spending. Now, Barcelona is in more debt than several entire nations, including the Faroe Islands, Greenland, St. Lucia, and San Marino combined. The question becomes, “how did they get themselves into this position?” Well, that’s what I will be exploring in this article.
This all began in 2017 when Barcelona sold Neymar to Paris Saint-Germain for approximately $265 million. They received the most money for any individual player in the history of soccer and felt the need to spend that money on new players.
Neymar’s replacement was Ousmane Dembele from Dortmund. At that time, he was seen as one of the most promising players in the world. Barcelona paid $171,665,200 for him, granting him a salary of about $10-12 million per year. Unfortunately, Dembele became an injury magnet the second he stepped foot at the Camp Nou. While he has occasionally scored, he has spent almost his entire career at Barcelona out with injuries.
Due to this, Barcelona bought Philippe Coutinho instead. At the time, he was also thought of as a very promising prospect. They paid Liverpool $144 million for him and gave him a contract that would guarantee anywhere from $19.9 to $20.9 million annually for six years. He ended up averaging 6.25 goals per season as an attacking player.
This led them to look for another Neymar replacement in Antoine Griezmann from Atletico Madrid. They ended up paying $139.2 million for him as a transfer fee and $815,562 per week/approximately $30 million per year for 5 years (which put him as the second top earner at Barcelona at the time, behind only Lionel Messi). This experiment did not work out as well as they had hoped, either. While he has averaged 17.5 goals per season, he has not had much playing time since. Therefore, he has not made the impact that they wanted.
Noticing that Barcelona had. a lot of money to spend, many players on the team began to ask for contract renewals. Barcelona decided to extend many of these contracts, putting them in an even worse financial position. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Barcelona now lacked the fans coming to the games, which led to extreme financial losses. Despite the absence of ticket sales, they still had to pay for the travel of players, the wages of hundreds of staff members, and still maintain their almost 99,000 capacity stadium. This made it so that it was impossible for them to re-sign Lionel Messi, the top earner on the team and by far the biggest source of revenue for the club, worth an estimated 30% of their revenue and 15% of their wages.
Now, even as they are $1.8 billion in debt, they are planning on building a new Camp Nou, which will cost at least another billion dollars, if not more. They have continued to sign players despite the situation, which has put them in even more debt and proves to debt collectors that they’re still spending recklessly. The fact of the matter is that by next year, there might not be an FC Barcelona. Normally when a club goes bankrupt, they’re either forced to restart as an amateur team in the 5th division, but if La Liga feels as though the spending is as absurd as it seems, they could very well be liquidated entirely.
