If the rumour mill was to be believed then all is hunky dory at the Spotify Camp Nou.
The fact that the naming rights for one of football's most iconic stadiums was sold for the very first time this year should go some way to telling you that everything isn't rosy at Barcelona, in fact the sale of the naming rights goes along with the selling off of 25 per cent of their TV rights to private equity fund Sixth Street Investments (which has since been claimed to have been artificially inflated) and 49.95 per cent of Barça Licensing & Merchandising (BLM), the company owned by Barcelona that is responsible for negotiating licences and merchandising, to allow them to realise some cash quickly.
Over £1bn in debt, much of it having been due in the short term, much restructuring has had to be undertaken through new loans, the selling of parts of the business to third parties, sponsorship deals and seeking voluntary reductions in the salaries of some of their biggest stars.
But while all this was going on the rumours continued to link Barcelona with a host of top talent from across Europe, including Liverpool right back Trent Alexander-Arnold, the man whose quick thinking corner to find Divock Origi in the Champions League semi-final to send the Reds through provided a hammer blow to the Spanish giants, the club heading into a tailspin that only got worse when the pandemic hit.
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'Barcelona want Trent for £67m', was the line. It was, of course, complete nonsense. For starters, the market value for Alexander-Arnold places him at more than £100m, and when you consider how important he is for Liverpool then it is hard to imagine he wouldn't be valued far higher than that.
Barcelona currently exist in some kind of fantasy land, happily linking themselves to everybody and anybody. There are suggestions Manchester City's Bernardo Silva could soon be on his way to the club. They have added Raphinha, Robert Lewandowski, Franck Kessie and Andreas Christensen, three of them on free transfers, but they are literally spending money that they haven't got and La Liga chiefs have informed them that they cannot register their new additions until such time that they significantly reduced the wage bill in order to come under the salary cap that was imposed on them by league chiefs to reign in their reckless spend and aid their financial recovery back to some kind of sustainability.
Barcelona are placing some big bets right now and care little, it seems, for the optics. They are spending future earnings, they are asking established players to take pay cuts to pay for new signings. The reason for all of this is that the Barcelona model is predicated upon them being winners, it is almost demanded by their 'socios' that they sit at the summit of European football year in, year out. But they are a shadow of what they were and have lost a considerable amount of the lustre that they had.
Spanish radio station Cope, via the Daily Mail, reported on Monday that Barcelona had allegedly placed money into a shell company to inflate the Sixth Street deal with the aim to buy back their own future TV revenues at a later date.
Jointly with Sixth Street, Barca set up Locksley Invest and sold 25 per cent of the club's future TV rights income were sold to Locksley, with Sixth Street paying £435m for them for the next 25 years and Barca paying £126m to buy them back in 25 years time.
Cope revealed the move, which is legal, and confirmed that La Liga did not accept the artificially-inflated declared income, only accepting the £435m from the Sixth Street deal. The move means that Barca could now find themselves hit with a tax bill close on £30m.
Think back to 2018 and Barcelona's interest in Philippe Coutinho. It is a well worn line, that deal, but it was transformational for Liverpool and laid the foundations for future successes, while for Barca it ended up being a stick with which to beat them, an example of how their excesses were folly.
At that time Barcelona were willing to spend whatever it took to strong-arm their rivals. Now they are trading on what they used to be, like an X Factor reject that was the the apple of the UK's eye for six weeks before performing at holiday parks and getting paid £50 to say happy birthday to Big Brian from all the lads at Kwik Fit.
The latest episode in the saga revolves around Frenkie de Jong, the Dutch midfielder who they signed for £65m in 2019 but who they have spent the summer trying to offload. He is owed around £17m in deferred wages from Barca, something that has hampered a prospective move to Manchester United. Now, in another twist, Barca are threatening legal action over the contract extension that was signed in 2020 between De Jong and the club's former board members, alleging 'criminality' over the deal handed to the Dutchman by Laporta's predecessors.
It marks a new low point for a club that cannot accept its reality because the only way that they deliver what they need to off the pitch is to remain at the top off it. It is the most prominent example of the dangers of operating in a transfer window to the whims of Twitter opinion. Many Barcelona fans will care little about any healthy net spend or a strong balance sheet, the expectation is that they should be hoovering up the best players regardless of the price. They are stuck in some kind of self-inflicted purgatory where they decide that the best way to address credit card debt is to go out and spend more on credit cards.
The landscape has shifted immeasurably between Barcelona and Liverpool. Moves such as linking Alexander-Arnold with a switch will have come quite willingly from inside the Blaugrana circles, a tactic designed to try and back up the notion that Barcelona are a club that can engage in such things. If John Henry was asking what Arsenal were smoking at the Emirates over Luis Suarez than he would surely have grave concerns over what was being puffed at the Camp Nou.
It is, of course, all bluster. Useless noise designed to take the attention off the train wreck that they have become. "Look into my eyes, look into my eyes, the eyes, the eyes, eyes, not around the eyes, don't look around the eyes, look into my eyes...you're under," or however Matt Lucas' hypnotist put it in Little Britain.
Liverpool under Fenway Sports Group are sometimes derided for their businesslike approach to running a football club. Ultimately, sustainable football is something that clubs will have to adopt, but the real question is which clubs can be a part of the elite to generate revenues to make their sustainability far easier than for the rest.
Liverpool have increased their wage liabilities and spent big on Darwin Nunez this summer. In years past a move for Nunez would have been something that Barcelona would have been all over, the same going for Manchester City striker Erling Haaland. But they weren't even on the radar, nowhere near.
Laporta has aided Barcelona's financial position with the pulling of these 'economic levers', but the headroom that has been created that La Liga chiefs would like to see aid the business performance of the club has been spent on more players. But when your business model requires you to be the best in class there is really very little room for regression.
Liverpool's approach of building a business to underpin a successful football team will enable them to continue to operate within the elite group in the transfer market moving forward, with a potential future move for Jude Bellingham something that Barcelona would have been all over at one stage.
It's unpopular among some for football clubs to be run as businesses, such is the emotion attached to them. But trophies have to be paid for in some way. Liverpool have managed to find a way to do that by spending less than others, the challenge for Barcelona is to get back to where they were by continuing to walk a path that lead to their president claiming that they were 'clinically dead' when he took over.
They are at risk of being left behind, and that is a terrifying thought for all involved at the Catalan club.
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