Shortsighted Barcelona continues selling pieces of its soul to stay afloat

On Wednesday in Catalonia, sometime around 11 p.m., two hours after the 24th game of a spiraling season, beleaguered FC Barcelona players will board an airplane bound for Dallas.

At any sane club, they’d be decompressing, settling in for a week of Christmas vacation. But here, at a club that continues to sell off pieces of its soul to stay afloat, they will fly 13 hours across the Atlantic, land around 5:15 a.m. Central Time and play another soccer game that night.

When the game, a friendly against Club América, the recently crowned champion of Liga MX, kicks off at 8 p.m. CT Thursday, their bodies will be weary. Their internal clocks, still on European time, will read 3 a.m. They likely won’t be thrilled that they’ve been dragged 5,000 miles from home for an exhibition 32 hours after a meaningful La Liga match when they could be resting and recovering.

But they will go, because their employer has said they will go, for a single reason: The friendly will reportedly net Barcelona some $5 million.

It will not help the team climb out of fourth place in La Liga. It will not help Robert Lewandowski recharge his aging, misfiring legs. It will not keep Ilkay Gündogan or Frenkie de Jong fresh for a Champions League run this winter. It will not help current stars whatsoever.

But it will, temporarily, help the club navigate a financial mess of its own making.

Two years ago, according to its own CEO, Barcelona was “technically bankrupt.” Reckless spending, mismanagement and the COVID-19 pandemic had left behind more than $1 billion of debt and jeopardized a once-revered institution. It led to the ouster of the club’s entire board and president, whose leadership had been “a disaster,” according to Lionel Messi. It’s the reason Messi left the only European club he’d ever known and the reason Barca has been struggling to afford and register new players since.

Messi’s involuntary departure in the summer of 2021, amid a precipitous on-field decline, should have been cause for introspection. It should have been an inflection point, a time to pause, reflect and try to restore the long-term health of a sickly club.

Instead, the club’s leaders chose to sacrifice long-term health for an immediate — but superficial and tenuous — boost, stopgap solutions that brought Barca back to the top of La Liga but might hinder the team for decades to come.

They called the solutions “levers,” the manifestations of impatience. They couldn’t stomach another Champions League group-stage exit or another season below Spanish soccer’s summit, so they began selling future revenue streams for instant injections of cash — which would allow them to purchase new players, which might, in theory, allow them to keep pace with Real Madrid and other continental giants.

They sold 49% of the club’s in-house media and production arm, Barca Studios, to Socios.com, a Maltese blockchain company, and Orpheus Media, a local Catalan company. They sold 25% of the club’s La Liga TV rights for the next 25 years to a California-based investment firm, Sixth Street.

In layman’s terms, they likely gave up billions of dollars in future revenue — money they’ll need to compete with English Premier League powers — for around $900 million right away, so they could balance their books, reduce their debt, fit fat contracts within La Liga rules and sign players such as Raphinha, Jules Koundé and Lewandowski.

Nine months later, in the spring of 2023, those players helped clinched a league title — and the “levers,” in a way, were vindicated. But now, nine months after that, Barca’s new reality has re-sunk in. Lewandowski, at 35, looks finished. Xavi, the visionary midfielder-turned-savior coach, is under fire. Girona, an overlooked club in a nearby Catalan city whose entire population could barely fill the Camp Nou, is nine points ahead of Barcelona at the top of La Liga. Real Madrid is seven points ahead, in second place.

And the club’s most notable response to this string of disappointing results — four wins in 10, beginning with October’s Clasico collapse — can be summarized with three familiar words: Need. More. Money.

The most recent saga involved club president Joan Laporta and an empty Champions League trip to Belgium. Barca had already qualified for the knockout rounds atop a straightforward group; its finale, against winless Royal Antwerp, was a so-called dead rubber. Xavi, naturally, planned to rest Lewandowski, Gündogan, de Jong and Ronald Araujo — until Laporta reportedly intervened. The reason? Each Champions League group stage win is worth $3.1 million, no matter the competitive significance (or lack thereof).

So Lewandowski, Gündogan and Araujo traveled to Antwerp. (De Jong called in sick.) The last-minute amendments to the squad created “unnecessary tension,” Xavi said. Lewandowski started, Gündogan got 30 minutes off the bench, many regulars played … and they lost 3-2.

They are still on to the Round of 16, in which they’ll face Napoli. And their underlying chance-creation numbers are still good, the best in La Liga. But they’re now being compromised by the club’s unending search for new streams of revenue, even as its finances stabilize.

The next potential saga involves the Thursday friendly against América at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. The assumption has been that only reserves would play, but Lewandowski and João Cancelo have been front and center in advertisements. Barca announced Monday that “all available players” will travel. They will spend more than half of the first 48 hours of La Liga’s holiday break on two transatlantic flights. And if any of them plays both Wednesday and Thursday, frankly, that would be absurd.

Laporta, meanwhile, will be more emotionally invested in the outcome of a court case in Luxembourg. He and his Real Madrid counterpart, Florentino Perez, have remained faithful to the ill-fated Super League because, as Perez said in 2021, “the Super League will save Barca.” It was Barca’s fanciful escape route out of financial ruin, worth an extra $330 million in annual revenue, according to Laporta. It was seen as so transformative and so economically necessary that after the exclusive league collapsed within 48 hours in 2021 amid widespread backlash, its few faithful founders sued UEFA in a last-ditch attempt to revive it.

They accused UEFA, the European soccer governing body, of running an illegal monopoly over European soccer. The European Union's Court of Justice agreed to hear the case. Its decision, expected Thursday morning, will either quash the Super League firmly for the foreseeable future and entrench European soccer’s existing structure — or blast open Barca’s escape route.

Laporta will receive the ruling as Barca’s charter plane speeds toward Dallas. Less than 24 hours later, two hours after a final whistle caps a $5 million payday, players will reboard the plane and take a second consecutive red-eye back to Spain. They’ll land Friday evening. They’ll have five days off. Then they’ll return to training and try to do the only thing they can to paper over all these problems and distract from more down the line: win.