Pique pay cut will let Barca play Memphis
RONALD KOEMAN said this week that he wants to ‘close the book’ on Lionel Messi.
The problem for Barcelona is the other ‘books’: the club’s accounts, in horrific condition after years of financial recklessness.
Today, as stadiums reopen in Spain, they play their first game of the season with an original allocation of 30,000 tickets taken up by only 15,000 of the club’s members, such is the gloom and doom around the club after Messi’s departure.
Barca were still struggling to register new signings Memphis Depay and Eric Garcia yesterday because they remained outside the Spanish League’s limits on player spending. A final-hour significant salary cut from Gerard Pique allows them to give Memphis his debut today against Real Sociedad.
The problems have not gone away since Messi’s departure. They still owe him £ 44million of deferred salary from last season.
The squad agreed to postpone wages in the 2020-21 season to help the club through the pandemic under previous president Josep Bartomeu.
Current president Joan Laporta has recognised privately that Messi needs to be paid this money. It’s another economic albatross around his neck. He has already admitted that Barcelona suffered losses of £410m last season and still have to service a debt of £1bn.
And while PSG boast of record shirt sales for Messi’s No 30, Barcelona know their own shirt sponsorship deal with Rakuten ends next year and their Nike agreement ends in 2023. If they are renewed they will be renewed for less money — an obvious repercussion of losing Messi, whose departure slices around 30 per cent off the value of the club to sponsors.
The club were told before the summer that they had to apply La Liga’s 1:4 rule before bringing in new players. For every euro they spent they had to bring in four.
That left them needing to make savings, or generate income, of £170m if they were to give Messi a new contract that paid him the minimum of £34m this season.
Their failure to generate any new revenue, be it with players taking pay cuts, stars sold, or the failed European Super League made keeping Messi impossible.
La Liga’s deal with the US investment fund CVC gave them a lifeline. But Laporta was told by his chief executive Ferran Reverter that he could not sign the deal which would have brought £240m to the club because it meant ceding 10 per cent of the money due to the club for sale of television rights over the next 50 years.
Without Messi, Barcelona don’t need to make the same sacrifices but to register new players they still need cuts of around £42m.
The board cannot move forward with the plans for a revamped Camp Nou while the existing stadium crumbles around them. They had to spend £ 1.7m this close season to make the arena safe for spectators.
Barcelona have been devastated by having their stadium closed for a year, the ongoing decline in football tourism, and La Liga’s determination to ‘level up’ the competition with deals that benefit all clubs instead of putting weight behind the Super League idea that would have only helped the big three and destroyed the rest.
Real Madrid have at least been sensible in recent years, have their stadium rebuild almost finished, and are confident of signing Kylian Mbappe if he is available on a free next summer.
Barcelona have no such consolation. This is their first season without Messi for 19 years and they can’t even take being allowed to register his replacement for granted.
‘We all know the situation the club finds itself in,’ Koeman said yesterday of Pi que’s s acri f i ce and expected ones to follow from other players to allow for the registration of the new signings.
‘Gerard [Pique], Sergio Roberto, [Jordi] Alba and Sergio Busquets have all been here for many years and they want to help.’
The upshot is Barcelona, highest global wage spenders in five of the last seven seasons, will, in 2021-22, pay salaries more akin to Everton, nudging £200m for the campaign. In 2017-18, Barca were splashing more than £450m on one season’s pay.
Meanwhile Messi’s new club, PSG, will see their wage bill soar past £400m this season, as in all likelihood will Manchester City, who have spent more on transfers in the past decade (£ 1.4bn and counting) than any other club.