Dani Olmo was Barça’s marquee signing last summer, coming off the back of his role helping Spain win the Euro 2024 championship. In January, his temporary licence to play for Barça – along with the registration of another summer signing, Pau Víctor – was revoked because the club contravened La Liga’s financial rules. It meant Olmo missed Barça’s Spanish Super Cup semi-final against Athletic Bilbao.
An extraordinary intervention by the Spanish government, however, overturned La Liga’s ruling, and Olmo was permitted to play out the remainder of the season. Olmo and Víctor’s ordeal spooked their team-mates. When quizzed, Raphinha, the team’s Brazilian forward, captured the feeling in the dressingroom: “Seeing the situation with Dani Olmo and Pau Víctor, if I were at another club I would think twice about signing for Barça.”
Six months later, and it looks like Marcus Rashford hasn’t paid heed. Rashford has left Manchester United and signed for Barça on a one-year loan deal, with an option to buy. He has not, though, been licensed by La Liga to play. Barça must clear out several players from its wage bill, or generate more income, to find space for him to register and play next season.
Nico Williams (23) was Barça’s preferred option to beef up their attack this summer. Williams got cold feet, though, and pulled out of a deal at the 11th hour. Personal terms were agreed. Barça were ready to pay a €58 million transfer fee, but they refused to insert an exit clause in the player’s contract, at the behest of his agent, Félix Tainta, in case Barça couldn’t register him. Williams signed a 10-year renewal deal with Athletic Bilbao in early July instead, leaving Rashford to step into the breach.
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Since Joan Laporta returned to Barça as president in 2021, the club has played Russian roulette with La Liga’s strict financial fair play regulations, pulling numerous stunts to get players registered for the start of the season. In the summer of 2021, with Lionel Messi bidding a tearful goodbye as he was shoved out the door on a free transfer to Paris Saint-Germain, his old team-mate Gerard Piqué agreed to a pay cut so several new players, including Eric Garcia and Sergio Agüero, could be registered.
There was more drama in 2022 (Ferran Torres, Jules Koundé), 2023 (Gavi, İlkay Gündoğan) and for the 2024-25 season with the high farce involving Olmo and Víctor. Each year, Barça found a way, but Laporta is running out of lives. He manages by the seat of his pants. Everything is improvised, left to the last minute.
Laporta is a populist leader, who defends Barça’s interests defiantly like an ultra, or he tries to disarm critics with his charm. In mid-July, for example, there was a furore over the club’s new icon, Lamine Yamal, and his 18th birthday party. It drew criticism because of the presence of dwarf entertainers. Also, a Spanish model, Claudia Calvo, posted on social media claiming she was approached by the party organisers to help gather 12 women for the party, and that their criteria focused “mainly on breast size or hair colour, whether they were blonde”.
In an interview with Mundo Deportivo, Laporta was given an open goal to join in some moral outrage but purposefully rifled his shot into the stands: “For me, he threw an 18th birthday party, and what I regret is not having gone.”
Laporta cannot, however, use attempts at humour to distract from Barça’s economic woes. The club’s financial problems are well publicised, but the scale of their mounting debt – in comparison to other top clubs – defies belief. As it stands, Barça, according to Football Benchmark, carries the biggest debt of any club in football – €1.26 billion, ahead of Real Madrid (€1.05 billion) and Tottenham Hotspur (€937 million), although Spurs debt is long-term, owing to stadium repayments, and it’s at favourable interest rates.
Barça’s stadium rebuild has yet to be added to its debt figure. The project was budgeted at €1.5 billion, but, according to Diego Torres at El País, it has ballooned to €2.8 billion, putting the club’s total debt north of €4 billion. This is a staggering sum, about 35 times the debt it carried before the Covid pandemic, which was €112 million in 2019.
This excludes the economic “levers” Barça pulled in 2022 when it sold off assets to fund a squad rebuild, including the sale, for instance, of 25 per cent of its La Liga television income for the next 25 years to an American investment firm, Sixth Street, for €552 million, meaning its down €40 million a season in TV revenues.
Barça’s immediate problem is that it’s leaking €100 million a season, by conservative estimates, while exiled at the city’s Olympic Stadium in Montjuïc, where the team has played since 2023. Some analysts suggest Barça’s matchday income is down €180 million a season from its glory days with Messi at the Camp Nou. (Real Madrid’s president, Florentino Pérez, bemoans the fact that Real Madrid and Barça are no longer as attractive to commercial sponsors as they were during the days of peak Messi-Cristiano Ronaldo rivalry.)
Barca’s return to the Camp Nou – in keeping with Laporta’s chaotic leadership style – keeps getting postponed. Originally, it was due to be in November 2024, to coincide with the club’s 125th anniversary celebrations. Then May 2025, at the time of Barça’s clásico match against Real Madrid, was touted. Then mid-September – at 60 per cent capacity – when the 2025-26 Champions League group stages kick off.
Now it seems it will be pushed back to the new year, at the earliest. It’s a ticking bomb – a debt of €4 billion, mounting interest, scrambling to refinance payments, further matchday income losses, with the 2028-29 season earmarked to close the Camp Nou stadium so its new roof can be put on, to shelter patrons from the rain, in Spain.
With the recklessness of a gambler hanging on to the rails, Laporta is spending like there’s no tomorrow. La Liga is shocked by the contract renewals Barça has unveiled over the last several months, including bumper long-term deals for Pedri, Gavi, Koundé and Lamine Yamal, whose salary has increased tenfold to approximately €40 million a season.
Barça also spent €25 million in June on Joan García, the first player to cross the city’s great divide from rivals Espanyol in 31 years. He’s the most expensive goalkeeper signing in Barça’s history, and a key personality in a simmering soap opera. Barça’s plan is that García will unseat club captain, Marc André ter Stegen, who missed most of last season through injury, but Ter Stegen isn’t playing ball.
Ter Stegen is keen to fight for his place and is determined to play for Germany in next summer’s World Cup finals, but after playing two games for Germany in the Nations League in June, he returned to preseason training in July with a repeat back injury that required surgery.
Conscious that Barça were trying to nudge him towards the exit door – as the club has signed a deal with Wojciech Szczęsny, who excelled last season, as a backup goalkeeper for next season – Ter Stegen published an open letter online to Barça fans maintaining his operation will require three months of recovery time.
It was seen as an act of retaliation, knowing that if he is out for four months or more, La Liga rules allow Barça to use 50-80 per cent of his salary to register other players, including García. It’s a dirty war. Barça have leaked press stories about Ter Stegen refusing to travel to Milan in May for Barça’s Champions League semi-final defeat to Inter because he wasn’t included in the squad, and that a decision about whether to strip him of his captaincy will be made when the club returns from a preseason Asian tour.
Barça are desperate to get Ter Stegen (33) off their books. They owe him approximately €42 million in salary payments until his contract expires in 2028. Ter Stegen, with justification, is miffed because the reason his salary is so high is because he agreed to defer payments in previous years, in a typical kicking-the-can-down-the-road manoeuvre by the club’s accountants.
Meanwhile, Rashford, who is on the same salary scale as Ter Stegen, is waiting in the wings. The mood music in Barcelona about Rashford has an optimistic beat. He is box office, part of a recent wave of English imports to Spain, including Jude Bellingham – who had a sensational first season at the Bernabéu – and Trent Alexander-Arnold at Real Madrid. Barça fans think of Rashford as a bet largely without risk – a season on loan, with a cheap option to buy at €30 million, a joker in the pack who could be a viable alternative, if he hits form, to the ageing Robert Lewandowski.
For Rashford (27) it’s a last chance saloon to prove himself in the big time, an opportunity to resurrect his career. At a personal level, it’s a dream move, somewhere sunny to find his mojo again away from Manchester United’s haunted house, provided he’s registered to play.
Brits at Barça
Remarkably, Marcus Rashford is the first British player to sign for Barça since the 1980s. When he signed for Barça in 1984, Steve Archibald had the cojones to take Diego Maradona’s vacant number 10 jersey because his team-mates felt, in Archibald’s words, like it was “infected”. The jersey fit – he scored on his league debut against Real Madrid in a 3-0 win that propelled the Catalan club to its first La Liga title in 11 years.
Archibald, a fan favourite at the Camp Nou who still lives in Catalonia, got the nickname Archigoles. Mark Hughes – who joined in 1986, increasing his salary ninefold by leaving Manchester United – was called El Toro because of his bullish style of play but failed to assimilate. After scoring only four goals in 28 league games, he left through the back door on loan to Bayern Munich before returning to Old Trafford.
Gary Lineker signed for Barça the same summer as Hughes but fared much better over three seasons – he learned the language, worked on his tan and loved the long lunches. It helped, too, that he hit the ground running, scoring twice on his league debut, and, memorably, a hat-trick later that first season in a gripping 3-2 win against Real Madrid’s Quinta del Buitre side in front of 120,000 ecstatic Catalans at the Camp Nou.
