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When FC Barcelona acquired Dani Olmo from RB Leipzig in August, they did so even though they clearly could not afford Olmo’s salary under La Liga’s Financial Fair Play rules, which regulate each club’s spending in relation to their profits and debts each season. and which Barcelona has been struggling with for years as a result of years and years of appalling mismanagement. Olmo ended up missing Barça’s first 2024 La Liga games because the club was unable to register his salary with the league.
Good (or at least “good”) fortune came in the form of an Achilles tendon injury to stalwart centre-back Andreas Christensen: in the event of an injury that keeps a given player out for four months or more, La Liga rules Leagues allow a team to spend (and record) up to 80 percent of that player’s salary in order to fill a void on the team. With Christensen out, Barça got the space they needed to register Olmo and young attacker Pau Víctor, but only until the end of December. The club would have until then to count on the services of Olmo and Víctor; If by then he had not accumulated the additional income or savings he would need to extend his registrations until the end of the season, the registrations would expire on January 1, which would prevent the two players from participating in La Liga matches. and give the club until the end of the January transfer window to re-register them.
Olmo’s contract, in particular, includes a clause that, if invoked, would make him a free agent if his registration is not completed by January 1. He will have no shortage of suitors in the January transfer window if he prefers to play. football league to, uh, be legally prohibited. Losing the club’s only eye-catching acquisition in the 2024 summer window, for nothing, in the middle of the following season, would be a catastrophic embarrassment for Barça (not to mention how badly it damaged the team’s prospects on the field) and It could well end the mandates of club president Joan Laporta and sporting director Deco. Therefore, while January 31 might be the hard deadline to register the two players for the second half of the season, January 1 is the deadline. effective deadline to avoid the very real possibility of a catastrophe.
We are already at the end of December, which in the case of Barcelona can only mean that all hell is breaking loose. Did the club generate new income, savings or combination of income and savings that would allow it to enroll Olmo and Víctor in the league for the second half of the season? Reader, it was not like that. A long-gestating and controversial new apparel deal with Nike, ratified by the club a few days before Christmas, did not work out; It is perhaps a revealing window into Barça’s apocalyptic financial situation that the deal, which was rumored to pay the club more than $104 million per season, did not create enough headroom to cover the salaries of the two players, who together certainly represent just a small fraction of that number.
Anticipating that the agreement with Nike might not be enough to register Olmo and Víctor, Barça filed a lawsuit against La Liga in early December, alleging that the league’s registration rules constitute an infringement of the two players’ right to work. and requesting a precautionary registration. that would allow both players to complete the season. The club used the same tactic to register midfielder Gavi’s contract with the first team back in 2023, and before the same judge who heard the case of Olmo and Víctor.
I am not a legal analyst; To the dubious extent that I know anything of value about the laws anywhere, they are not those that govern employment relations in Spain. Facially, for me, as a layman, I’m not even wearing socks as I write this thousands of kilometers from Barcelona in a room where my eldest son plays. Skyrim On television, Barça’s claim in this case seems at least strongly to smack of a lie, at least in the sense that Barça was well aware of La Liga’s FFP rules long before adding Olmo and Víctor to its books. If those rules infringe Olmo and Víctor’s rights, then Barça is at least complicit in having knowingly jeopardized those rights in the first place; Whether La Liga’s reckless and harsh application of those rules has done more harm than good in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that ruined the finances of all its member clubs, that is a separate issue from the fact that Barça has repeatedly acted in blatant contravention of those rules. Regardless of what you think about whether Child Protective Services should have the authority to take children from their abandoned parents, your argument loses credibility if you make it. after You get caught letting your kids play with a box of hand grenades on the front lawn.
In any case, Judge Ignacio Fernández de Senespleda did not buy the argument this time, ruling against the club on Friday and raising the very real possibility that Barça will not be able to extend Olmo’s registration at the start of the new year. Several other La Liga clubs, including Atlético Madrid, Athletic Club and Sevilla, reportedly argued strongly against Barça’s case.
Club spokespersons in the Spanish press continually report that Olmo has no intention of invoking his exit clause and only wants to continue at Barcelona. On the other hand, those same spokespersons also continually reported the club’s confidence that the judge would rule in their favor; and the club’s confidence that the agreement with Nike would cover its obligations with the FFP; and the club’s confidence already in the summer that the sale of Barça Studios would settle its obligations with the FFP; and the club’s summer boasts of a major commercial deal that would settle its FFP obligations, which turned out to be a petty, embarrassing and far from sufficient partnership with the very disreputable American food services company Aramark; and the club’s confidence in signing Nico Williams in the summer window; and the confident projections of the club’s president, Joan Laporta, that the renovation of the Camp Nou stadium, begun in the summer of 2023, would already be completed. As for that last one, the blaugrana It now seems unlikely that he will return to the old stadium before the end of this season, so.
Barça are not short of options at the moment, but even these demonstrate how bad decisions tend to beget more bad decisions. The first, which is already underway, is a second lawsuit against La Liga, alleging that the league is not competent to enforce its own FFP regulations because, the club argues, it has inconsistently enforced them. If this works, it will allow Olmo and Víctor to complete the season in Barcelona; If it fails, and also if it succeeds, it will further alienate the club within the league, at a time when its lack of allies has already bit the club in the butt in the first demand.
The second option, much discussed in recent weeks, involves selling 20-year leases for a number of VIP seats at the Camp Nou, still under construction. Barça estimates that this measure, if carried out right now, could bring in something in the order of 120 million euros, possibly enough to avoid an immediate disaster, but far from what the club could obtain if it waited and sold those seats. after the complete renovation of the stadium, instead of scrambling to unload them in the next four days. The third option implies that the members of the club’s board of directors guarantee their assets and personal assets to cover the cost of Olmo and Víctor’s registrations; The club did it before, in 2022, to sign Jules Koundé after buying him from Sevilla. (This last option is extremely acceptable to me, an uninvolved party who thinks all those guys have too much money anyway, but it certainly is No how the Barça ruling class wants to manage the club’s affairs.)
The fourth option (selling players to make room for Olmo and Víctor’s inscriptions) is a possibility, but a weak one. On the one hand, player sales cannot be made before the transfer window opens on January 1; While the sales could help the club register the two players before January 31, they could not exclude the disastrous possibility of losing Olmo for nothing, should he decide to break his contract when his registration expires. On the other hand, the team is on the decline of late, having fallen to third place in the league in recent weeks, as coach Hansi Flick’s exciting, grueling, action-packed style tests the team’s lack of depth and resistance to injuries. Shortening the squad just to keep two players already in the team will only make the second half of the season more difficult at a time when the club literally cannot afford poor results in any of the few different competitions. . None of this means that the club does not attempt Forcing marginal players out (or hiring someone to hit Ansu Fati’s knee with a lead pipe) if none of the other options bear fruit, but going this route would solve, at best, one of the club’s problems deepening another.
These messes have tended to be resolved in time to avoid the worst-case scenarios for Barcelona, generating ever greater portions of ill will from the rest of the world. Even now, with only a few days left on the schedule and the club having exhausted all but the most humiliating options, the safe bet is probably that Laporta will achieve some kind of shady resolution that allows Barça to keep Olmo and Víctor and move on. using them in league matches until the end of the season. The League itself, despite the fact that the club and its media exponents have presented it as the enemy in all of this, has tended and has tended to act (or refrain from acting) based on a vested interest in limiting the abjection of one of its emblematic members. .
But the margins certainly seem increasingly repetitive of this farce. If this isn’t the moment when Laporta’s sweaty Howard Ratner routine finally hits the limits of his swindling ability, the plexiglass keeping creditors at bay has never seemed flimsier, and those creditors have never seemed more, well, more willing to do what Howard Ratner did.
