BarcelonaOnce it has reviewed all the numbers at the end of the market, the League published this Friday the table of the salary limits of the 20 teams in the First Division. The club with the highest figure is Real Madrid, with 683 million euros, followed by Barça, which abandons the red numbers (part of the negative 27 million at the beginning of the summer) and places its ceiling at 656 million. Espanyol raises its limit to 72 million, while Girona leaves it at 42, the same amount as Elche, with whom it shares the tail in this particular ranking.
The numbers given by the League do not correspond to the salary mass of each professional staff, but establish a ceiling on the bill that clubs can assume in sports matters taking into account their income and deducting management expenses and accumulated losses. If the limit is respected, the famous fair play financial health is good and the club in question can operate as normal. If not, the fair play is exceeded and suffers the penalty of registering new tokens only worth a quarter or a third of what is previously released.
The figures that the League has published were those that were waiting in the Camp Nou offices after a summer marked by the sale of assets. The famous levers have served to reverse the straits in a handful of weeks and without needing large savings in terms of salary, since almost all the large contracts inherited from the Bartomeu board remain in force and without cuts.
The first sale of audiovisual rights (10% for 25 years) to the company Sixth Street for 207 million allowed to close the financial year 21/22 with profits. The second sale, of 15% during the same time and to the same investment fund, made it possible to fix the negative net worth and invest more than 150 million in the signings of Raphinha Dias, Robert Lewandowski, Jules Kounde and Pablo Torre ( Andreas Christensen, Franck Kessie, Marcos Alonso and Héctor Bellerín have arrived on a free transfer).
Barça’s original idea was to pull the first two levers to be able to proceed with the registration of all the new faces, but Javier Tebas’ League did not accept the capital gains presented by the club in relation to the two operations. Therefore, pressed by the start of the official season, and with exits blocked, Laporta had to sell almost half of Barça Studios for 200 million to raise the salary cap and register all players except Kounde before Barça -Lightning of the first day. The Frenchman was able to enter the third game thanks to a personal endorsement of 11 million from Barça president and treasurer Ferran Olivé, while Marcos Alonso and Bellerín were signed up thanks to Pierre Aubameyang’s departure at Chelsea. The work between the executives of the sports area and the economic area in this heart attack summer has been immense.
Tebas warns that the situation is extraordinary
The summary provided by the League shows a sanitized Barça for the purposes of fair play financial thanks to the four activated levers. 800 million euros of extraordinary income have made it possible to sign and register footballers who were unattainable a summer ago. But the employer warns that the manna will not last forever and urges the club to control spending so as not to have problems in future FIFA windows. “Barça has never been at risk of bankruptcy, but it would have to reduce its wage bill to around 400 million because it will not be able to maintain this salary limit.” The theory is clear. In fact, Barça’s economic vice-president, Eduard Romeu, already explained it a few months ago. In practice, however, Barça’s current squad represents more than 600 million annual expenses because there have been no considerable salary savings and high-profile signings such as Lewandowski have arrived, who, as reported by Cadena SER, will receive 20 million dirty
Therefore, Barça’s short-term horizon is to renew Pablo Gavi once and for all to normalize Ronald Araujo’s situation, but above all to reduce, now yes, the wage bill. In this context, the notice of a possible crime in the current contracts of Marc-André ter Stegen or Frenkie de Jong is collected, as well as the efforts to cut the huge backpack of salary and deferrals (130 million) that add up between Piqué , Busquets and Jordi Alba. And attention: only Busquets ends his contract next summer.
The Griezmann case
In parallel with the publication of the salary limit for La Liga clubs, Barça and Atlético de Madrid are experiencing a conflict over Antoine Griezmann’s situation. The Blaugrana club leaked on Thursday night that it is preparing a lawsuit for the Matalasser club to pay the 40 million euros that were agreed last summer in a transfer operation with compulsory purchase for this amount. They consider from the Camp Nou that a transfer was closed for one season with another optional one and that it was very clear that Atlético had to pay the transfer fee if they used the French player 45 minutes or more in half of the matches Last season, Griezmann played 80% of the games and Barça, therefore, believes that for practical purposes he already belongs to the Madrid entity, which must pay the 40 million euros. On the other hand, from the Wanda they do not want to pay the figure and, to avoid problems, they limit the participation of the attacker in Simeone’s plans so that this second transfer season does not reach half of the participation. “Demands are made, aren’t they they prepareso what we interpret from Barça’s move is that it wants to negotiate”, they say to ARA from the environment of the player, who wants to go to the World Cup. Tebas also had his say: “The subject has been raised in the hands of an arbitral tribunal”.
