To hear Barcelona's many faithful mouthpieces in the Spanish press tell it, ad nauseam over the past few weeks, the Catalan club has the money and intention to pay 22-year-old Athletic Club star Nico Williams's €58 million release clause, and an agreed-upon offer of personal terms awaits his final OK. In this version of events, Williams—Lamine Yamal's good friend, Euro 2024 co-hero, and vacation buddy—need only say the word, and the club will pay the clause, and he will join the Blaugrana, and that is all there is to it. Hell, they might even go and get Dani Olmo after that.
In this version of the story, Williams not yet having acted is a total mystery. What is his deal? Why is he dawdling? Everyone has done everything that can be done up to this point, and he is holding up the show. Monday afternoon's reports have taken a warning, if not outright threatening, tone: The club grows impatient with Williams. Maybe they will decide to stop waiting around, and go for Olmo instead.
To some extent this is all familiar, if dreary, transfer-market stuff, a big club issuing leaks to portray its squad-building efforts in the most flattering light, and to apply pressure to its targets. That's no small goal of all the leaking, in this case: to reassure fans and socis that Barça remains a legibly operative big club, conducting normal big-club business at, well, not quite the scale of Real Madrid, but with purpose and potency in any case. It's also a sham.
For one thing, Barcelona is broke. That is a sentence some version of which I have typed on this website probably close to 10 times in the past two years, and it is just as flatly true now as it was back in the summer of 2021, when Lionel Messi left. Years of frantic—and in some cases failed—financial lever-pulling have left a gigantic smoking hole in the club's expense sheet: Barça is far outside of compliance with La Liga's Financial Fair Play (FFP) rules, has not yet received the league's green light to make acquisitions, and likely will have to arrange not one but several important player exits before it can even register all the player salaries already on its books, to say nothing of adding new ones. Meanwhile, nearly all of the players whom club brass might like to sell off either are injured (defender Ronald Araújo, midfielder Frenkie de Jong) or have shown zero interest in leaving (defender Iñigo Martínez; midfielders Ilkay Gündogan and Pablo Torre; forwards Raphinha, Ferran Torres, and Vitor Roque) or have very little market value relative to their salary (defender Clement Lenglet), or all three (forward Ansu Fati).
Due to its abysmal FFP noncompliance, Barcelona has been operating in a restricted capacity for the past couple of years, in which only a small portion of any money it raises or saves (e.g. through player sales or salary reductions) can be spent on new acquisitions; the end of that austerity rainbow is something informally called the "1:1 rule," a state of FFP grace in which a club can spend at a 1:1 ratio to money it opens up via sales or savings. Only free license to operate under the 1:1 rule—which Barcelona has not received as of this writing—could give Barça any hope whatsoever of bringing Williams over from Athletic Club. Under last season's 4:1 restriction, Barça would have to raise some €240 million just to pay Williams's release clause, to say nothing of adding any salary to the books.
Back at the end of May, La Liga president Javier Tebas expressed some guarded optimism about Barcelona's ability to "achieve a 1:1 situation [...] if they resolve some important matters that are pending"—a careful bit of politics that both gave Barça fans hope and also laid responsibility for it at the feet of club president Joan Laporta. In July, Laporta boasted to Catalunya Radio that "economically speaking, we could commit" to Williams's signing—meaning only that the club possessed, or could possess, the funds to pay Williams's release clause and salary—but spoke only in vague future-tense about FFP compliance, assuring that "shortly we will be able to announce some good news" in that regard. No such news has arrived in the near month that has elapsed since then, just a few more careful, vaguely passive-aggressive remarks from Tebas and Laporta, each subtly or less-subtly implying that his organization has done its part ... and thus that if Barça does not accomplish any big summer moves, it will be the other one's fault.
What seems clear is that as of this writing, Barcelona is not just one Nico Williams thumbs-up from adding one of Euro 2024's breakout stars to its squad—not even close. It's not at all clear that Barcelona, for all the confidence it has communicated to its fans and club members through its press apparatchiks, is in position to fulfill any single step of the process.
It's a real mess, in other words. Messi's case is instructive for those curious about Williams's apparent hesitation. In 2021, Messi left in tears of grief when he learned that the club wouldn't be able to register his salary under a new contract. In 2023, farcical efforts toward bringing him back to Barcelona collapsed over the club's inability to guarantee his registration, with Laporta offering instead the preposterous, farfetched scenario that if Leo committed to coming back, then his presence could be used to pressure some of the club's existing players to leave, and if those players left in time, then the club would have cleared enough salary off its books to register Leo's. Having been burned once already, and not being the dumbest person alive, Messi took Inter Miami's money instead, and left his former club looking deservedly ridiculous.
That is, for all practical purposes, the exact deal on offer to Williams today: Commit, in the total absence of guarantees, to a potentially month-long game of chicken against his own teammates, for what will end up being less money than he could get somewhere else. With the very real danger that, if the club cannot successfully use him as a lever to eject some number of those teammates, he will find himself unregistered with the league at the close of the transfer window. The mystery isn't why Williams hasn't said yes to this yet, but why he didn't say no to it weeks ago.
Which raises, in turn, the question of why Barça is doing any of this in the first place. The club's reported offer to RB Leipzig for Olmo's transfer was an outright joke: A transfer fee paid in puny installments over the course of four years, with something like a full third of it conditional upon sky-high performance targets. By all accounts Leipzig's people laughed it out of the room. Why do this? Why even bother?
Here it's worth recalling that, when Laporta abruptly reversed course and dismissed manager Xavi Hernández back in May, the inciting incident, according to all reports, wasn't any of the team's many poor showings under Xavi, but rather Xavi's dour public assessment of the club's near-term financial ability to compete with Real Madrid. Since then, Barça's great rivals polished off their second Champions League title of the past three years and added Kylian Mbappé. Now Laporta is flailing about, very publicly chasing not one but two luxury attackers Barcelona plainly can't afford, at the very peak of their acclaim and reputation, in a moment when the club needs deep cost cuts just to register the players it already has. If it's in earnest, he's insane. If it's theatrics, he's a contemptible conman. If it's pure ego, he's the most reckless clod in the sport.
None of this is meant to predict or guarantee that Barcelona will not eventually get Williams, or Olmo, or even both. A year ago I wrote about how ludicrous and insulting Barça's pursuit of João Félix and João Cancelo seemed, and then both of them played this past season with the Blaugrana, on cheap club-friendly loans. Hell, by the time I hit publish on this blog, maybe Fabrizio Romano will have gone here-we-go mode on Williams and Olmo and I will look like a fool.
But even that will only be the opening of the next ugly chapter, in which the club mobilizes its media exponents to harass and shame a handful of unwanted players toward the door. That's a now-annual ritual each potential new Barça player should view as a glimpse into his own future. Més que un club, baby.
