Barça's Financial Mess May Cost Them Messi
It's probably inevitable, given sports' penchant for the pursuit of filthy lucre -- something that's been happening since the dawn of sport itself -- that European football's Super League will come to pass someday.
But not today.
And FC Barcelona's denial of that rather obvious fact is almost assuredly gonna cost them the best player ever to pull on a Blaugrana jersey.
All because club president Joan Laporta insists on believing in Super League visionary Florentino Pérez as his own personal tooth fairy.
Last summer, all the drama revolved around Lionel Messi and his threat to leave Barça for more potent pastures. Cooler heads ultimately prevailed, and this time, there were no such pretenses. Dude wanted to stay.
It looked good. After banking €70m in base salary last season, La Pulga agreed to a hefty hometown discount, as in a 50% cut. The club merely had to register his contract with La Liga.
That's when they were made aware the math wasn't adding up.
In the harsh light of cold reality, Barcelona's finances had finally hit the repercussion highway.
- Their P&L was in fairly sorry shape before the pandemic wreaked havoc on last season's bottom line.
- La Liga's resultant slashing of its team's salary caps absolutely clobbered the Blaugrana, from €671.4m to €382.7m.
- When the league crunched the numbers in Messi's deal, they found his upcoming wages to be 110% over the limit.
Messi's deal was for €70m last season. Even at this year's €35m, the team couldn't find a way to massage another 10% outta the deal to comply with the league's formula for budget allocations.
The hell of it is, a simple solution was right in front of Laporta.
Earlier in the week, La Liga announced it'd sold a 10% stake to CVC Capital Partners, a crew that's experienced a sharp learning curve in the business of sports. They'd taken their licks after owning and selling Formula 1, so they had their numbers in peak order when they recently entered into an arrangement with Six Nations Rugby and Spanish football's two top tiers.
In other words, whether the likes of Barcelona or Real Madrid liked it or not, this was the best deal La Liga was going to get.
The cash-starved Blaugrana woulda gained more than €200m outta this, more than €40m of which coulda been spent on transfers or new contracts.
Like Messi's.
They'd have been in compliance with the league's budget formula, and dude's 17-year senior association with the only club he's ever known -- scoring and incredible 672 goals in 778 matches -- woulda kept raking in the dosh that his presence creates for their global media revenues alone.
Instead, Laporta joined Real in rejecting the CVC offer, somehow drinking the Kool Aid and putting faith in the warped notion that the Super League and its promise of dosh falling outta the sky would shower them with even more euros to dig them outta their self-inflicted financial disaster.
The only thing that fell outta the sky was the Super League itself.
This defies all known logic and most rules of the universe as we know it.
It also means Messi will be moving on.
All indications are he'll next kit up at Paris-St Germain, where euros flow like wine because their beancounters have a clue as to keeping it all on the right side of a good thing.
So, while an alternative reality lives on in Barça, Real, and Juventus -- maybe because the courts have frustrated UEFA's attempt to discipline them for their breakaway ways -- PSG now has reinforced dreams of finally hoisting some Champions League hardware in this and every successive season Messi stays with Mauricio Pochettino and his already glittering cast of football luminaries.
Maybe someday, Laporta and Barça will be seen as visionaries who stuck with a Super League as it rose from the ashes of shame and became the colossus of European football.
But for now, they're just viewed by most of the Blaugrana's paying customers as the greedy rat bastards who had a golden opportunity to keep a legend in their colors but instead ditched him in favor of a pipe dream.