Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you’ll know Barcelona is a bit of a mess these days.
The 8-2 loss to Bayern Munich in last season’s Champions League quarter-finals kicked off a series of events with Lionel Messi trying to leave and president Josep Maria Bartomeu was urged to walk ahead of him. to be pushed.
Years of mismanagement have seen Barcelona rack up nearly £ 1billion in debt, and their financial situation hasn’t exactly been helped by the need to pay Messi like the only player he is.
Between inking his last contract in 2017 and watching it expire at the end of the current season, Messi will have pocketed no less than £ 492million for four years of work. It’s the biggest contract in sports history, and it’s not even close. Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes has struck a deal worth £ 402million, but it’s spread over ten years, not four.
£ 492 million. It’s obscene.
Messi is obviously a special talent whose skills have earned him a big salary, but paying him £ 69million every season not to leave the club is ridiculous. It’s the equivalent of signing a world-class player every summer, but that’s not why Barcelona are in the mud these days.
After all, while they sign a Messi every summer, they are also spending a ridiculous amount of money signing other players.
£ 142m on Philippe Coutinho. £ 135.5m on Ousmane Dembele. £ 107million on Antoine Griezmann. These are three extremely expensive signings that appear to have been under-planned, and none of them worked.
That’s £ 384.5million in transfer fees for these new players, and that doesn’t even take into account the salary this trio earned. Everything will work the same as the £ 492million picked up by Messi, but the results of spending on these three countries have not been as good as with Messi.
With the search for someone capable of helping Messi proving even more difficult than imagined, Barcelona have had to pay Messi ridiculous amounts just to keep him on board. The fear of failure has cost Barcelona more wages than any other sports team.
Coutinho, Dembele and Griezmann are generally seen as the posters of financial mismanagement at Camp Nou, but these are only the most significant examples.
Team players like Neto, Junior Firpo, Martin Braithwaite, Jasper Cillessen, Malcom and Andre Gomes have all cost significant sums and offered very little in return, but all of this points to Barcelona’s crippling desire to win now.
For Barcelona, being second is not enough. Global domination is the only acceptable outcome, and the persistent lack of success has only heightened the need to keep spending. They need the best team in the world and are willing to pay to make sure they get it.
La Liga success is necessary, but he plays the second fiddle to Champions League glory – something Barcelona haven’t tasted since 2015. As each failed tournament passes, club officials have no more itching to improve, and humiliating losses to Roma, Liverpool and Bayern only make things worse. For Barcelona, the only way out of the hole is to spend.
The kids in the Academy can’t be trusted because no one knows if they’re good enough to be pros. You have to spend over £ 20million on someone with experience as it lowers the risk and due to that lack of confidence La Masia has been left to rot.
The talent factory that produced figures like Andres Iniesta, Xavi and Messi himself has been ruled out in favor of signings from big names who should make Barcelona better, but the results did not come.
Because of this need for immediate success, Barcelona have found themselves with unsustainable debt, unsaleable players and an academy that only recently returned from the brink of collapse.
You can’t run a business that way, and Barcelona are learning it now. Messi’s contract is atrocious, but it’s a drop in the ocean of everything that has gone wrong at Camp Nou over the past decade.
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