How Barcelona's lever-pulling president Joan Laporta survived calls to step down to signing Anthony Gordon, Karim Adeyemi, Rodri and maybe even Julian Alvarez

When Josep Maria Bartomeu resigned as Barcelona president in October 2020, he did so in disgrace, with the Catalan club in a state of total disarray, on and off the field.

Barca had won four league titles during Bartomeu's tenure, as well as a treble at the end of his first season in charge, in 2014-15, but he had left the Blaugrana on the brink of bankruptcy.

To this day, Bartomeu says that the global economic meltdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic was solely responsible for Barca's financial problems.

Just this year, he told EFE: "With the pandemic, we don't have the stadium open, there’s no ticketing, no season tickets, the shop is closed, there's no museum, no football schools, and that reduction in income obviously causes a cash-flow problem that is solved by borrowing. That's what happened to the vast majority of clubs in Europe."

However, few clubs were hit as hard by the pandemic as Barca - and that was down to Bartomeu, who had left the Blaugrana particularly vulnerable to the effects of the economic crash.

Between July 2015, when Bartomeu secured re-election on the back of a treble triumph, and his departure in October 2020, Barca signed 29 players at a cost of just over €1 billion (£895m/$1.2bn). Not one of them was an unqualified success.

Worse still, outrageously expensive flops such as Ousmane Dembele, Philippe Coutinho and Antoine Griezmann put a tremendous strain on the club's finances - particularly as Bartomeu foolishly ignored La Liga's suggestion that no club spend more than 70 per cent of its annual revenue on wages.

"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," Bartomeu said. "We can afford it." But they couldn't - at least not during or after the pandemic.

When coronavirus hit, Barca had a squad full of ageing players on colossal wages that they were unable to offload in the transfer market. Consequently, when Joan Laporta succeeded Bartomeu as president in March 2021, he felt he had no choice but to allow Lionel Messi, the club's highest earner (and by some distance), to leave Camp Nou upon the expiration of his contract that very summer.

"I did what I had to do," Laporta told El Pais earlier this year. "Leo was nearing the end of his career and we needed to build a new team. Would I have liked to build the new team with Leo's help? Yes, and we tried. But it wasn't to be."

It quickly became clear, though, that simply offloading Messi wasn't going to solve all of Barca's problems, which were far bigger and much more deeply-rooted than many outsiders realised. Consequently, Laporta was left with a difficult decision to make.

"Laporta basically had two options," Marc Menchen Alba, CEO of the Barcelona-based company 2Playbook, 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 latter.

In the summer of 2022, Barcelona raised €582m (£495m/$591) by selling 25 per cent of the club's Liga broadcasting rights for the following 25 years to investment company Sixth Street. This was the most significant of several economic 'levers' Laporta would pull to alleviate the club's financial issues.

Basically, the Barca president was mortgaging future earnings to cover present-day deficits, in the belief that short-term success was the best way to facilitate long-term recovery. "I remember thinking at the time, this is a bold move," Menchen says. "But I didn't like it because I thought there were safer ways to go about it."

The early results were encouraging, though. As well as signing Lewandowski from Nagelsmann's Bayern Munich for €45m, Barca also brought in Raphinha and Jules Kounde during the summer of 2022 for a combined €108m thanks to Laporta's lever pulling - and the gamble paid off at the end of the season, as Barcelona won La Liga for the first time for four years.

The problem, though, as Menchen points out, is that "Laporta's high-risk move led to Barca suffering nearly every summer. We were constantly wondering if the club would be able to register new players." And the summer of 2024 was particularly trying.

Unsurprisingly, the supporters were even more upset by the Dani Olmo affair. They'd essentially had enough of Laporta and his levers.

"The situation created is inadmissible, and the damage caused to the reputation of the entity is irreparable," fan group Som un Clam said in a statement. "The bad image is aggravated by the continuous lies and the deception of members with false promises that are never fulfilled and that end up harming the Club.

"In just four years, FC Barcelona's assets have been decapitalised with various 'levers', selling strategic assets for the future to cover holes derived from chaotic and improvised management.

"Despite promises of recovery, the club still lacks a solid financial plan or a coherent strategy to ensure stability in the medium and long term.

"We demand an end to the unfulfilled promises, constant improvisation and irresponsible sale of assets that are mortgaging the model of collective ownership that makes us unique.

"A change of course is urgent. It is necessary to recover the transparency, planning and values that have made Barca 'more than a club'. The future of Barca depends on us, its members, and we will not sit idly by while the institution degrades.

"Faced with this situation, Som un Clam insists that the vicious circle in which we have entered due to the management of the board endangers the heritage of our club and its ownership model.

"For this reason, we ask for the resignation of the president and the board of directors, while we call on Barca fans to mobilise, reverse this situation and make their voices heard."

Despite the increasingly toxic atmosphere around Camp Nou (and its seemingly never-ending redevelopment!), Laporta weathered the storm and, 18 months on, the future is looking a whole lot brighter for Barca.

The Blaugrana wisely made just one significant signing last season, Joan Garcia, and even that was a bargain buy, as the goalkeeper had a €25m release clause in his Espanyol contract.

At the same time, Barca also recouped almost double that fee by selling a plethora of players, the majority of whom had come through the club's famed academy, La Masia, meaning they generated nothing but 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.

"And remember, Real Madrid is doing the same thing, selling a lot of players that came out of La Fabbrica, which is why they were able to pay for Yan Diomande and other big names this summer.

"Every year Barca and Madrid invest 20 to 30 million in their academies, and they're really reaping the rewards of doing so this year."

This summer's outlay has obviously resulted in a massive net spend in the transfer market, but Barca did manage to somehow convince Paris Saint-Germain to pay €48.5m (£43m/$59m) for Ferran Torres, while Lewandowski's departure on a free transfer, and Liverpool's willingness to cover all of Ronald Araujo's salary during his loan stay at Anfield, significantly eased the strain on the wage bill.

So, could Barca yet bring in Alvarez to fill the significant hole in the attack left by Lewandowski? As things stand, Menchen is not so sure. However, the pure-profit sale of another academy product might well do the trick.

"You always to 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.

"Also, 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.

So, does this mean that Barcelona's financial troubles are over? "They are for now," Menchen says. "My one minor concern is the 40 million that Barca continues to pay to Sixth Street for the Liga rights. It might not seem like a lot of money for a club that earns a billion in revenue on an annual basis but it's still a game of small margins and it could prove the difference between Barca signing a player that Madrid also want.

"However, I do think we are seeing the beginning of the end of Barca's most serious financial problems. Laporta made a high-risk move, the kind of decision that a president sometimes has to make, and I think he'll feel with the passing of time that he was right to do so - particularly with Barca winning three of the last four La Liga titles.

"I still believe it would have been better to review the spending and avoid some of the deals that he did. I think avoiding some of the signings he made would have saved Barca some money, and meant that they would haven't have to sell future Liga rights.

"We still don't know exactly what will happen further down the line. But we can say that Barcelona are no longer in a position where they have to pull any more levers." And that's definitely a good thing for a club run in a "weird and crazy" manner for far too long.

Click here to read article