The Case of FC Barcelona: Financial difficulties bringing a legacy into jeopardy

FC Barcelona is one of the most famous sporting institutions in the world. The club has shaped the way the game of football has been played in recent generations and has won countless trophies, with the rich culture and beautiful football to match.

But as of December 2024, Spanish courts have ruled that Barcelona cannot register marquee signing Dani Olmo, meaning the Catalan giants are faced with the real possibility of losing such an instrumental player in Spain’s Euro 2024 triumph if the situation is not resolved.

La Blaugrana’s financial deterioration has been building for the best part of a decade now, with 2025 marking the 10-year anniversary of when Barça last won the UEFA Champions League. With the feeling growing that the club may have reached another breaking point, how did we get here?

FC Barcelona was founded in 1899 by Joan Gamper and has been an ever-present member of La Liga since the division’s inception in 1928.

The club has had many iconic figures throughout its history, but two men to whom Barça owe a lot of their success are Johan Cruyff and Pep Guardiola.

Cruyff first joined the club in 1973 as the widely believed world’s best player at the time, for a then-world record transfer fee of £920,000. The Dutchman would later return as manager in 1988, constructing the ‘dream team’ and leading Barcelona to their first European Cup win in 1992.

Crucially, a key member of Cruyff’s Barça side was none other than Guardiola, who would go on to change the club’s history once again when he returned as manager in 2008. Taking inspiration from Cruyff’s teachings of ‘Total Football’ – a Dutch system developed during Cruyff’s playing career in the 1970s where players were free to move around and switch positions during a match – Guardiola popularised the now-globally renowned ‘tiki-taka’ style of pass and move football.

Guardiola’s Barça side boasting superstars such as Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta and Xavi spoke for itself, with the club winning the Champions League four times in 10 years leading up to 2015. Many argue that this was the best club football side of all time.

Barcelona really had it all. Their club motto says that they are ‘més que un club’ (more than a club in Catalan), and the whole world believed it.

To quote a book in Catalan by J. Oriol Magrinyà and Irene Noguer named after the slogan: “Més que un club ha anat de boca en boca, recorrent els cinc continents, fins a convertir-se en part inseparable de la marca Barça. Amb el temps, s'ha anat construint el relat del Barça més enllà del futbol, donant sentit a la singularitat del Club.”

This translates to: “More than a club has gone by word of mouth, touring the five continents, until it has become an inseparable part of the Barça brand. Over time, Barça's story has been built beyond football, giving meaning to the club's uniqueness.”

But in the present day, almost five years of financial turmoil has left the club almost unrecognisable from what it was prior to the pandemic. And with the latest news regarding Olmo and Pau Víctor and a pending court case against La Liga over their ruling on the matter, it doesn’t look as if normal service will be resuming for a while yet.

The controversy centres around La Liga’s salary cap, which ensures that clubs do not spend beyond their means on players. These salary caps are revised each year based on individual clubs’ spending data, and financial mismanagement can lead to a club’s cap being reduced, meaning they must either sell players or have stars accept pay cuts to make new signings.

But this is where it gets complicated. There is a caveat in the rule which allows for signings to be made to replace the wages of long-term injury absentees. In this case, Barcelona used the injury of Andreas Christensen to justify the signings of Olmo and Víctor. But their registration was only accepted temporarily, until January 1, 2025 – leading to the situation in which we now find ourselves.

Writing for Marca, Barcelona specialist journalist M. Carmen Torres dubbed the situation “Un drama deportivo, institucional y... ¡económico! para el Barça” (a sporting, institutional and economic drama for Barça).

Torres continued: “If it is confirmed that the former Leipzig player [Olmo] cannot continue to be part of the Barça squad, as everything seems to indicate at this time, the Catalan club will have a void in Hansi Flick's team, the image of Laporta, the board and the entity of the club will be seriously damaged and the institution will also face an even deeper black hole in its coffers.”

Barcelona’s financial difficulties have been building for some time, with the Covid-19 pandemic and the division-wide spending cuts it provoked uncovering reckless spending by the Catalans in seasons prior.

The signings of Philippe Coutinho, Ousmane Dembélé and Antoine Griezmann are often cited as the catalysts for Barça’s financial collapse, with the three costing a combined total of €390m and all flattering to deceive.

But not all of it was reckless spending. A sizeable portion of Barcelona’s initial financial woes related to huge contracts belonging to the final survivors of the ‘tiki-taka’ generation – the likes of Messi, Gerard Pique and Sergio Busquets.

While their high wages were certainly justified, by 2021 there was no more room for sentimental value. These ageing stars equally had to take pay cuts.

Or move on, as was the case with Messi in August 2021 – a moment which sent shockwaves around the sporting world, and showed how serious Barcelona’s financial issues truly were.

The club has debts which are reported to be in the billions of euros, and the board led by Club President Joan Laporta have had to take drastic measures by selling off assets and percentages of the club’s revenue in order to stay competitive on the pitch.

This has angered fans, some of whom hold small stakes in the ownership of the club – as FC Barcelona is run by the ‘socios’ model of fan ownership, similarly to a handful of other Spanish clubs such as Real Madrid – Barça has always been known as a club of the people, but to some, it feels as if this is slowly slipping away.

Had it not been for Barça’s iconic La Masia academy continuing to produce world-class young talent of the likes of Lamine Yamal, Pau Cubarsí and Gavi, the club’s squad would be in a far worse position than it is currently.

Regardless, the case of what is going on in Barcelona is an intriguing one. How long will it be before these financial woes are firmly behind them, and the Catalan superclub becomes a European powerhouse once again, bringing back the Champions League glory that its fans so dearly crave? Only time will tell.