Right around three weeks ago the story, as leaks to F.C. Barcelona's multitude of shameless mouthpieces in the Spanish press had it, was that the club was mere minutes away from clearing three main summer objectives.
First, the club would announce its purchase of star Spanish winger Nico Williams from Athletic Club for the amount of his roughly €60 million release clause. Second, Barça would announce a major infusion of cash from the belated closure of a shady investment deal left incomplete last summer. Third, with the second step complete and Barça's books brought into compliance with Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations, La Liga would bless the club with permission to operate under the so-called "1:1 rule," allowing Barça to spend money in equal proportion to funds it raised via sales or salary reductions and facilitating its registration of Williams's salary. And then, hell, to celebrate its triumph, the club might even go out and get Spanish attacker Dani Olmo from RB Leipzig, too.
As of this writing, at least 75 percent of that has already turned out to be a sham, which maybe isn't even all that bad a percentage for Barcelona business dealings these days. The club had never actually been close to signing Williams, who, in the absence of any even halfway credible assurances that Barça would be able to register his contract, would not recklessly ditch the home club where he is adored and gets to play with his brother. The infusion of cash turned out to be an embarrassing partnership with the deeply disreputable American stadium-vending company Aramark, for a piddly amount roughly one fifth the size of the hole in Barcelona's books—and one third the amount the club would have needed just to pay Williams's release clause under the 1:1 rule. As to that, La Liga has not consecrated the club's restoration to the 1:1 rule—because the club has not closed the hole in its books, nor significantly lowered its wage bill, nor indeed done much of anything beyond making a lot of noise.
Not that a return to the 1:1 rule, in and of itself, would have made Williams's registration possible, mind you. The rule merely permits spending in equal proportion to new income or new savings; in order to spend what Williams would cost, the club would have to raise that much. Let's come back to that in a second.
While none of that stuff was happening, Barcelona did go out and close the transfer of Olmo away from Leipzig for something on the order of €55 million, back on Aug. 9. This despite the club not having closed the hole in its books—despite, in fact, the club presently being unable to register the salaries of some of the players it already has. The Blaugrana opened their La Liga season this past Saturday at Valencia without Olmo in the squad. Publicly, the reason was that he hadn't gotten enough training with his new team to get into match fitness. Maybe that's true, but what's also true is that he hadn't been registered with La Liga, and still hasn't.
Relatedly, today the big story around Barça is that midfielder Ilkay Gündogan has agreed to depart the club. Or has decided he wants to depart the club. Or has been told that he must leave. Or Pep Guardiola has decided to bring him back to Manchester City. The long and short of it is that he is being forced out, so that Olmo can be registered in the space where his salary used to be.
This is an annual ritual at this point, as predictable as the unveiling of a new kit design: At some point, club brass will make an ugly public effort to poison the earth under a given player or players' feet, so that they will accept an exit on the club's terms and save it some money to spend on somebody else. To the extent any of this is surprising, it's only that this routine so abruptly targeted Gündogan, whom the club pursued for at least two years before acquiring him on a free transfer last summer, who was Barça's best and most dependable player last season.
Before this morning, this year's campaign had centered itself most cruelly on 19-year-old Brazilian forward Vitor Roque, a case even more disgraceful than Gündogan's. Barça sporting director Deco rushed Roque's acquisition in January, reportedly to satisfy club president Joan Laporta's desire for a gaudy Brazilian splash to rival Real Madrid's signing of Endrick, and against then-manager Xavi's express wish that the club spend its meager January transfer budget on a credible defensive midfielder. Roque, a raw goalscorer coming from an Athletico Paranaense playing style sharply different from Barcelona's, was a discarded exile at the end of the bench virtually from the moment he arrived. This summer, the club awarded his jersey number to budding superstar Lamine Yamal and has left him unregistered with the league, effectively presenting Roque with a choice between finding somewhere new to play and putting his entire career into suspended animation.
The pressure will not stop with Gündogan and Roque. This is at least the third summer in which the club has tried to seed rumors that Manchester United wants to break the bank to acquire midfielder Frenkie de Jong, who manifestly has no interest in leaving and who has been out for months with a severe ankle injury. To hear the club's attendant press outlets tell it, half the clubs in England and Saudi Arabia are desperate to purchase forward Raphinha. Hilariously, Sunday brought obviously ridiculous rumors in the Catalan papers that Newcastle, bloated with Saudi sovereign investment fund money, has decided that it must have forward Ferran Torres—one day after he was the worst player on the pitch against Valencia.
In almost all cases this shit doesn't even work. Last summer one of the club's most frequent previous targets for transfer-window abuse, Ousmane Dembélé, finally left Barcelona—when it wanted him to stay, and by invoking a contract clause that netted the club a puny fraction of his open-market transfer value. Ansu Fati, Eric García, and Pablo Torre all eventually gave in last summer, going out on loans that saved the club money on their wages—and all three are back this summer, with their transfer values at best unchanged and their place in the squad no more secure than it was a year ago.
If anything, this cruel treatment of players probably makes the club's business harder than it might otherwise be. Consider the case of De Jong, who makes gigantic wages at Barcelona in large part because he accepted salary deferrals when the COVID-19 pandemic put Barça in acute danger of being unable to fulfill its payroll obligations. His reward for that has been for the club to mount nasty public campaigns against him, year after year, to try to get out of paying those deferrals, and to portray him in the media as selfish for simply continuing to fulfill the terms of his contract. If you were, say, Fati or Clément Lenglet right now—contractually entitled to a wage no other club in Europe would even momentarily consider offering you—would you agree to defer part of that salary to help the club out this summer, knowing how the club turned on De Jong after he did the same?
Barcelona was in bad enough financial shape, by all accounts, that it would have had to welcome any and all willing player exits even if the club had made no effort to add anyone this summer. Moreover, for however financially strapped Barça is, it is also preposterously blessed with young homegrown talent and was not under any plausible circumstances going to have any trouble fielding a squad that could compete for a top-four finish in La Liga. That only makes Olmo's acquisition—and the treatment of Gündogan and Roque that acquisition has prompted—all the more galling. Laporta and Deco bought a show dog when they couldn't even feed the ones they already had.
There's an alternate reality in which Barcelona made no acquisitions this summer, wagering that its fans, shown the reality of the organization's dire financial situation, would embrace a bright young squad with somewhat lowered ambitions but worlds of potential. In that reality, Barça would regard Gündogan as perhaps the ideal experienced professional to bring some poise and order to that group, and Roque as a rough diamond who could understudy Robert Lewandowski—the expiration of whose contract, next summer, will wipe some €34 million off of the club's wage bill.
Then again, that version of Barcelona, run with foresight and accountability, probably isn't in such deep shit to begin with. Joan Laporta and Deco definitely do not have jobs there. Hell, maybe that Barça can afford Dani Olmo!
