09/08/2021
Who is to blame for Messi’s exit from Barcelona?
Is it Barcelona’s leadership and its mismanagement of the club or La Liga’s tough regulation rules? Or something else?
Even something as beautiful as Barcelona and Lionel Messi’s 21-year love affair can be broken by the cold, hard logic of debt.
Like the tragic end of a romance film, Messi did not want to leave Barcelona, and Barcelona did not want Messi to go, but alas, a force more powerful than both broke them apart.
The man whom many consider the greatest footballer of all time cried at a news conference on August 8, telling the Catalan media that he had no choice but to leave: “The club did not want to go into more debt.”
Barcelona’s fans are looking for answers, with fingers being pointed in various directions. The club’s leadership has been accused of mismanagement; La Liga has been chastised for sticking to its regulations; Messi himself has been criticised for putting money before loyalty. So what is the real reason behind the Argentinian superstar’s heartbreaking exit?
Blame game
It has taken no time at all for the blame game to start about Messi’s messy exit from Barcelona. Certainly, there is plenty of responsibility to be dished out.
The fan-owned club has been mismanaged so badly that for every euro ($1.17) earned, it has been paying out 1.10 euros ($1.30) solely on player salaries. By definition, expenditures far outstripping revenues means the club has been relying on a growing debt burden to pay for big-name signings and their huge pay packets, with the club’s total debt having now broken through the one billion euro ($1.1bn) barrier.
Messi claims to have done everything he could to stay, and he had agreed to take a 50 percent cut in his salary. However, his previous contract was worth an astonishing 555 million euros ($652m) over four years, the highest of any sports person in history, and included 115 million euros ($135m) just for signing the deal and 78 million ($91m) as a “loyalty bonus”. After making money like that, he could have agreed to play at Barca for free for a season to help the club he loves through its troubles and still have been the most handsomely paid footballer in the world for the past half-decade.
And then there is La Liga, which runs the top two divisions of Spanish football. In 2013, it created new financial rules for clubs which set limits on what clubs can spend on their playing squad in a single season based on an analysis of their financial health. La Liga found that, after the financial impact of the pandemic, Barcelona needed to make significant cuts to player salaries to stay within the rules, a drop of 47.1 percent from 656 million euros ($770m) to 347 million euros ($407m).
OPINION
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Football
Who is to blame for Messi’s exit from Barcelona?
Is it Barcelona’s leadership and its mismanagement of the club or La Liga’s tough regulation rules? Or something else?
Ben Wray
Ben Wray
Freelance journalist and researcher
9 Aug 2021
Lionel Messi announced he was leaving FC Barcelona on August 8, 2021 [File: Reuters/Albert Gea]
Lionel Messi announced he was leaving FC Barcelona on August 8, 2021 [File: Reuters/Albert Gea]
Even something as beautiful as Barcelona and Lionel Messi’s 21-year love affair can be broken by the cold, hard logic of debt.
Like the tragic end of a romance film, Messi did not want to leave Barcelona, and Barcelona did not want Messi to go, but alas, a force more powerful than both broke them apart.
The man whom many consider the greatest footballer of all time cried at a news conference on August 8, telling the Catalan media that he had no choice but to leave: “The club did not want to go into more debt.”
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Barcelona’s fans are looking for answers, with fingers being pointed in various directions. The club’s leadership has been accused of mismanagement; La Liga has been chastised for sticking to its regulations; Messi himself has been criticised for putting money before loyalty. So what is the real reason behind the Argentinian superstar’s heartbreaking exit?
Blame game
It has taken no time at all for the blame game to start about Messi’s messy exit from Barcelona. Certainly, there is plenty of responsibility to be dished out.
The fan-owned club has been mismanaged so badly that for every euro ($1.17) earned, it has been paying out 1.10 euros ($1.30) solely on player salaries. By definition, expenditures far outstripping revenues means the club has been relying on a growing debt burden to pay for big-name signings and their huge pay packets, with the club’s total debt having now broken through the one billion euro ($1.1bn) barrier.
Messi claims to have done everything he could to stay, and he had agreed to take a 50 percent cut in his salary. However, his previous contract was worth an astonishing 555 million euros ($652m) over four years, the highest of any sports person in history, and included 115 million euros ($135m) just for signing the deal and 78 million ($91m) as a “loyalty bonus”. After making money like that, he could have agreed to play at Barca for free for a season to help the club he loves through its troubles and still have been the most handsomely paid footballer in the world for the past half-decade.
And then there is La Liga, which runs the top two divisions of Spanish football. In 2013, it created new financial rules for clubs which set limits on what clubs can spend on their playing squad in a single season based on an analysis of their financial health. La Liga found that, after the financial impact of the pandemic, Barcelona needed to make significant cuts to player salaries to stay within the rules, a drop of 47.1 percent from 656 million euros ($770m) to 347 million euros ($407m).
Barcelona President Joan Laporta blamed the club’s failure to re-sign Messi on La Liga’s refusal to bend its rules, but Barca happily signed up to these regulations in 2013 along with the 19 other La Liga clubs. Blaming financial regulations for Barcelona’s problems is a bit like blaming a doctor for preventing you from cutting your own hand off: Barcelona’s financial crisis will not be solved by more lavish spending. A more rational line of questioning in La Liga’s direction would be to ask why the rules had not been a lot tougher to prevent the club from getting into such a mess in the first place?
Indeed, so desperate was La Liga to keep Messi in Spain that they agreed to a deal in principle last week to sell a 10 percent stake in the league to private equity firm CVC partners, in return for a cool $3bn to be shared between the 20 clubs.
Laporta said that financial boost would have provided the additional cash the club needed to re-sign Messi, but at the expense of selling a stake in the league’s financial future – most importantly, the TV broadcasting rights, a devil’s bargain he could not support.
A structural problem
Barcelona has clearly been very badly run, but take a step back from the finger-pointing and one can see that the club’s risky approach was the thin edge of a long wedge in elite football, where there are clear, rational incentives to throw caution to the wind in an industry which lavishes financial rewards on those who win big.
For Barcelona, signing the latest star players was an attempt to cement the club’s position as one of two or three at the commercial and sporting pinnacle of world football before the Messi era was over.
Not only was it competing with archrival Real Madrid in this respect – a club that also finds itself in major debt trouble chasing similar dreams of global domination. But it was also trying to challenge the giants of English football clubs, which receive substantially more in TV broadcasting money every year, as well as mega-rich new rival Paris St Germain, which has already lured Neymar away from the Catalan capital with Qatari cash and now appears set to bag Messi.
Clearly, the club made calamitous transfer decisions under the leadership of former President Josep Maria Bartomeu, such as spending nine-figure sums on three flops – Philippe Coutinho, Ousmane Dembélé and Antione Griezmann. But the short-term pursuit of sporting glory as a route to overcome the commercial gap with their European rivals did have a certain business sense.
That TV money disparity partly explains why Barcelona, Real Madrid and Italian giant Juventus have been the most determined to continue their pursuit of the Super League, while the six English clubs which also signed up to the breakaway competition gave up on the idea after a few days of intense fan backlash in April.
