BarcelonaIt will be a year since the first public diagnosis of Joan Laporta this Friday after winning the Barça elections. On 28 May 2021, today’s Barça executive president gave a long-awaited press conference in which he ratified Ronald Koeman, stated that he did not trust Xavi Hernández as a coach for the immediate future and stated that the renewal of Leo Messi it was going “well.” He also expressed the desire to renew Rakuten’s sponsorship and predicted that “in a year and a half” he and his professional team – which still had Ferran Reverter – would turn the financial situation upside down. 365 days after that marathon appearance, and beyond the obvious contrast between words and deeds – Messi is not there and Xavi is – the economic crisis continues to mark the day to day at the Camp Nou. In fact, the Egarenc coach has not stopped referring to him to try to get excited for next season, in which it is assumed that patience will melt if the team continues without convincing the grass.
“We have to strengthen both yes and no,” concludes Xavi, who, like Jordi Cruyff and Mateu Alemany, in charge of planning the squad, is waiting for encouraging news from the economic area to start executing sports decisions. The famous “levers” are the star theme in the club’s offices. “There are many things on the table, but each operation needs its time,” an executive who is involved in the ongoing negotiations admits to ARA. “Laporta wanted to have an impact and reverse both the negative heritage and the fair playbut they are showing him that it is impossible, that it is better to renovate the kitchen first and then the rest of the rooms in the house “, says another well-informed source of the state of the talks, which are currently conditioned by an internal resistance to the president’s haste to empty his backpack, replenish his own funds on the expressway and return to normal operation, among other things, treasurer Ferran Olivé is trying to convince him to go “step by step” , activate the agreement with CVC and thus close the course comfortably to gain time to mature the other levers.
With the British fund provided by the League – and which is funded by Goldman Sachs – the issue has been raised for weeks by 270 million in exchange for the sale of 10% of the club’s television rights for the next 50 years. Laporta has tried to make the operation more beneficial for the purposes of fair play financial, but the League has been inflexible to avoid comparative grievances with other Spanish clubs and only allows to allocate less than 50 million for this purpose, which neither reverses the excess salary nor allows great joys beyond registering the signings of Kessié and Christensen or the renewal of Araujo. However, from the economic area, Laporta is urged to accept these impediments to close the 2021/22 financial year without drama, reduce the pressure for the success of the other operations underway and – very importantly – win the in favor of the president of the League, Javier Tebas, after many months of cold and sticks in the wheels. CVC’s money would go into capital – not debt – before June 30 and be used to save the annual accounts. “It’s true that this operation helps us to stop the blow and little else, but it’s better now than to end another year with losses,” they admit from the Camp Nou with some resignation.
An acronym cake to look to the future
The joy would not be complete with CVC because the fair play it would continue to be negative and the need to generate sports gains – with De Jong, Memphis or even Gavi -; therefore, it would continue to exist to aspire to hire new footballers. Weakening the workforce is always an option, but the organization prefers to study alternatives and explore the sale of less traumatic assets such as merchandising and the audiovisual business. As he advanced 2Playbook, there are talks to transfer part of BLM to Fanatics and Investindustrial, but from the Camp Nou it is admitted that the operation has cooled down since it transpired in the media and will hardly be closed in the short term. It is also valued to sell an extra 30% of the television rights for 40 years in exchange for 600 million through an agreement that would be structured in tranches – one capital and one debt – with the All Sports Finance fund and the connivance of Goldman Sachs, with whom the club has pledged the same rights. But this lever, like Barça Studios and the NFT (collectible digital files) business, is not working well enough either. In fact, ASF is just in the process of requesting information from the club, such as the clause in the agreement with Spotify. That is why it is so difficult for the deal to be accelerated to the point that the always optimistic and determined Laporta, who dreamed of resigning from CVC – the agreement he already rejected before losing Messi – wants to fly free without the protection of Thebes.
