Barcelona's Financial Recovery: From Bartomeu's Crisis to Laporta's Gamble
When Josep Maria Bartomeu finally walked away from the presidency in October 2020, Barcelona were not just bruised. They were broken.
On paper, his spell in charge did not look like a disaster. Four La Liga titles, a treble in 2014-15, Messi at his peak, the Camp Nou full and roaring. But the glitter hid a gaping financial crater. By the time he left, Barca were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
Bartomeu has never accepted that this was his doing. To this day, he points the finger squarely at Covid-19. No fans, no ticketing, no season tickets, no shop, no museum, no football schools – that was his explanation in an interview with EFE this year. Revenues collapsed, borrowing filled the gap, and, as he put it, “that’s what happened to the vast majority of clubs in Europe.”
Only Barcelona were not like the vast majority of clubs in Europe. They were far more exposed – and that was down to him.
A billion spent, nothing truly gained
The numbers are stark. From July 2015, when Bartomeu won re-election on the back of the treble, to his exit in October 2020, Barcelona signed 29 players. The bill: just over €1 billion (£895m/$1.2bn). Not one of those signings can be called an unqualified success.
Some were catastrophic. Ousmane Dembele, Philippe Coutinho, Antoine Griezmann – three headline arrivals, three enormous financial millstones. Fees, bonuses, wages; everything spiralled. At the same time, Bartomeu brushed off La Liga’s guidance that clubs should not spend more than 70 per cent of revenue on salaries.
“The LFP and UEFA make recommendations but nobody sets a salary cap. We are above what is recommended but the important thing is to be sustainable,” he said. “We can afford it.”
They could not. Not once the pandemic hit.
When Covid arrived, Barcelona were left with an ageing, overpaid squad and almost no market for their big earners. The wage bill was suffocating the club. So when Joan Laporta returned to the presidency in March 2021, he inherited not just a mess, but a crisis. And at the centre of it stood Lionel Messi.
Messi’s goodbye and Laporta’s fork in the road
Messi was the club’s highest earner by a huge margin. He was also the symbol of everything Barcelona wanted to be. Laporta still chose – or felt forced – to let him go when his contract expired that summer.
“I did what I had to do,” Laporta told El Pais this year. Messi, he argued, was nearing the end of his career and the club needed to build a new team. Yes, he would have preferred to do that with Messi on board. They tried. It collapsed.
And even then, it quickly became obvious that losing Messi would not magically fix anything. The structural problems were deeper, older, more entrenched than many outside Catalonia understood.
Laporta faced a brutal choice. Marc Menchen Alba, CEO of Barcelona-based 2Playbook, lays it out plainly.
“Laporta basically had two options,” he tells GOAL. “The first would have involved focusing solely on reducing the wage bill and selling players, which would have obviously reduced the competitiveness of the squad and basically meant travelling through the footballing wilderness for two or three years.
“The second option, though, was to try to raise as much revenue as possible, and as quickly as possible, by effectively selling off future assets to start winning again immediately.”
Laporta chose the second path.
The levers, the gamble, the title
The summer of 2022 became the summer of the “levers”. The most dramatic move saw Barcelona sell 25 per cent of their La Liga TV rights for the next 25 years to investment company Sixth Street, bringing in €582m (£495m/$591m). It was a huge, long-term commitment to solve short-term pain.
Laporta was, in effect, mortgaging future income to cover today’s deficits, convinced that winning again quickly would drive the recovery. Menchen watched on with mixed feelings.
“I remember thinking at the time, this is a bold move,” he says. “But I didn’t like it because I thought there were safer ways to go about it.”
On the pitch, though, the impact was immediate. Those levers funded a rebuild: Robert Lewandowski arrived from Julian Nagelsmann’s Bayern Munich for €45m, while Raphinha and Jules Kounde cost a combined €108m. Barcelona were suddenly aggressive in the market again – and they were rewarded with their first La Liga title in four years.
The bill, though, did not go away. It just moved.
“Laporta’s high-risk move led to Barca suffering nearly every summer,” Menchen points out. “We were constantly wondering if the club would be able to register new players.” The summer of 2024 felt particularly fraught, every registration a saga, every negotiation overshadowed by spreadsheets.
Fan fury and calls for resignation
Supporters, already weary of financial acrobatics, snapped during the Dani Olmo saga. For many, the levers had become a symbol of a club gambling with its soul.
Fan group Som un Clam issued a blistering statement. They called the situation “inadmissible” and the damage to the club’s reputation “irreparable”. They accused the board of “continuous lies” and “deception of members with false promises that are never fulfilled and that end up harming the Club.”
Their anger focused on the very strategy Laporta had embraced. In just four years, they argued, Barcelona’s assets had been “decapitalised” through the sale of strategic future income to plug holes created by “chaotic and improvised management”. Despite repeated pledges of recovery, they saw no solid financial plan, no coherent medium- or long-term strategy.
They demanded an end to “unfulfilled promises, constant improvisation and irresponsible sale of assets that are mortgaging the model of collective ownership that makes us unique.” They called for a change of course, a return to transparency, planning and values – the principles that once made Barca “more than a club”.
Som un Clam went further. They warned that the “vicious circle” created by the board’s decisions threatened the club’s heritage and ownership model. Their conclusion was clear: they called for the resignation of the president and the board, and urged fans to mobilise and “reverse this situation”.
The mood around Camp Nou – or more accurately, around a club playing away from its spiritual home while the stadium undergoes a seemingly endless redevelopment – turned toxic. Yet Laporta survived.
A quieter market and La Masia’s double role
Eighteen months on, the landscape looks different. Not perfect, but undeniably calmer.
Barcelona made just one major signing last season: Joan Garcia. Even that deal was opportunistic rather than extravagant, with the goalkeeper’s €25m release clause at Espanyol making him a relatively cheap solution.
At the same time, the club sold heavily. Many of those departures came from La Masia, the academy that has long been Barcelona’s pride. From a financial standpoint, those deals are gold. Academy graduates cost nothing in transfer fees, so their sales are recorded as pure profit.
“You can see with the likes of Lamine Yamal and Pau Cubarsi just how important La Masia is to Barcelona in terms of producing players for the senior squad,” Menchen says. “The players that come through the academy know exactly how to play for the first team, so that reduces the need to spend money on transfers.
“But La Masia also means producing players with a relatively high market value and, very significantly, over the past few windows, we’ve seen Barca do really well in terms of the sale of academy graduates.
“In the past, a lot of these players left for nothing and that was because Barca was trying to find space for these players in the first team but it wasn’t possible, so they ended up leaving for free. Now, we are seeing 18 and 19 year olds that most fans have never even heard of leaving for 5 or 10 million euros, which is very helpful when it comes to meeting budgetary requirements.”
Real Madrid are exploiting the same model with La Fabrica, Menchen notes. Those academy sales helped fund moves for players like Yan Diomande. Both Spanish giants pour €20-30m a year into their academies – and this year, they are cashing in.
Big sales, big holes, and the Alvarez question
This summer’s business has still produced a hefty net spend, but Barcelona have also pulled off some crucial exits. Paris Saint-Germain paid €48.5m (£43m/$59m) for Ferran Torres. Lewandowski left on a free transfer, trimming one of the heaviest salaries from the books. Liverpool agreed to cover Ronald Araujo’s full wages during his loan at Anfield, easing more pressure on the payroll.
That leaves the football question: who replaces Lewandowski up front?
Julian Alvarez has emerged as a dream target, a potential solution to the “significant hole in the attack” left by the Polish striker. Can Barca afford him? Menchen is cautious.
As it stands, he is not convinced they can do it outright. But the pattern is familiar: one more clever sale from La Masia could change everything.
“You always have to remember that this is a cash-flow business, so if you sell Marc Casado, for example, for thirty million, you could cover the cost of Julian Alvarez for this season, as the cost of a new signing is amortised, meaning it’s spread out over the duration of his contract,” he explains.
The logic is simple. Move one academy product for a big fee, unlock the numbers for a marquee arrival. It is ruthless, but it is the reality of modern Barcelona.
The end of the levers – and one lingering worry
There is, at last, a sense that the club is edging towards normality. La Masia sales, the eventual completion of the new Camp Nou, and a rebound in tourism that should boost museum and matchday revenues all point in the same direction.
“Selling players from La Masia, combined with the eventual completion of the new Camp Nou, the increase in museum revenue tied to the recovery of tourism in Barcelona, means Barca will probably be able to operate with complete financial freedom next summer for the first time since before the pandemic,” Menchen says.
So, are Barcelona’s financial troubles over?
“They are for now,” he replies. One concern remains: the annual €40m payment to Sixth Street for those Liga rights. For a club targeting €1bn in yearly revenue, it might not sound crippling, but at the elite level, small margins decide big battles.
“It could prove the difference between Barca signing a player that Madrid also want,” Menchen warns.
Even so, he believes the club is emerging from the darkest stretch of its modern history. Laporta rolled the dice. He will argue, especially with Barcelona having won three of the last four La Liga titles, that the gamble was justified.
Menchen still thinks some of the spending could have been avoided. Fewer risky signings, fewer desperate deals, and perhaps those future TV rights would still belong entirely to the club. The long-term verdict is not in yet.
But one thing is clear: Barcelona are no longer in a position where they need to pull more levers. For a club that has been run in what Menchen calls a “weird and crazy” way for far too long, that alone changes the entire conversation about what comes next.
