When F.C. Barcelona acquired Dani Olmo from RB Leipzig back in August, it did so despite clearly not being anywhere close to able to afford Olmo's salary under La Liga's Financial Fair Play rules, which regulate each club's spending relative to its earnings and debts each season, and which Barcelona has been wrestling with for years as a result of years upon years of hideous mismanagement. Olmo wound up missing Barça's first couple of 2024 La Liga matches because the club couldn't register his salary with the league.
Good—or anyway, "good"—fortune came in the form of an Achilles tendon injury to trusty center back Andreas Christensen: In the event of an injury that will keep a given player out for four months or longer, La Liga rules permit a team to spend (and register) up to 80 percent of that player's salary for the purpose of filling the hole in the squad. With Christensen out, Barça got the space it needed to register Olmo, plus young attacker Pau Víctor—but only through the end of December. The club would have until then to benefit from Olmo's and Víctor's services; if by then it hadn't drummed up the additional income or savings it would need in order to extend their registrations through the end of the season, the registrations would expire on Jan. 1, rendering the two players unable to participate in La Liga matches and giving the club until the end of the January transfer window to get them re-registered.
Olmo's contract, in particular, includes a clause that, if invoked, would make him a free agent if his registration isn't completed by Jan. 1. He'd have no shortage of suitors in the January transfer window, if he prefers playing league soccer to, uh, being legally prohibited from it. Losing the club's lone splashy acquisition of the 2024 summer window, for nothing, midway through the ensuing season, would be a cataclysmic embarrassment for Barça—to say nothing of however badly it damaged the team's on-field prospects—and might very well end the tenures of club president Joan Laporta and sporting director Deco. Thus, even though Jan. 31 might be the hard deadline for getting the two players registered for the second half of the season, Jan. 1 is the effective deadline for avoiding the very real possibility of catastrophe.
The end of December is now upon us, which can only mean in Barcelona's case that all hell is breaking loose. Did the club generate the new income, or savings, or combination of income and savings that would permit it to register Olmo and Víctor with the league for the season's second half? Reader, it did not. A long– and contentiously gestated new apparel deal with Nike, ratified by the club a few days before Christmas, didn't do the job; it's perhaps a revealing window on Barça's apocalyptic financial state that the deal, rumored to pay the club more than $104 million per season, didn't create enough headroom to fit the two players' salaries, which together certainly amount to only a small fraction of that number.
Anticipating that the Nike deal might not suffice to get Olmo and Víctor registered, Barça filed a lawsuit against La Liga earlier in December, alleging that the league's registration rules amount to an infringement upon the two players' right to work and asking for a precautionary registration that would allow the two players to complete the season. The club used the same tactic to register the midfielder Gavi's first-team contract back in 2023, and in front of the same judge as heard Olmo's and Víctor's case.
I am no legal analyst; to the dubious extent that I know anything of value about any laws anywhere, they aren't those governing labor relations in Spain. Facially, to me, as a layperson not even wearing socks as I type this thousands of miles from Barcelona in a room where my eldest child is playing Skyrim on the TV, Barça's claim in this case seems at the very least strongly bullshit-scented, at least in the sense that Barça was well aware of La Liga's FFP rules long before it added Olmo and Víctor to its books. If those rules infringe upon Olmo's and Víctor's rights, then Barça is at least complicit in having knowingly jeopardized those rights in the first place; if La Liga's insensate, heavyhanded enforcement of those rules has done more harm than good in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic wrecking all its member clubs' finances, that's a separate issue from Barça having repeatedly acted in brazen contravention of those rules. However you might feel about whether Child Protective Services should have the authority to take children away from derelict parents, your argument loses credibility if you raise it after you get caught letting your kids play with a box of hand grenades on the front lawn.
In any event, the judge, Ignacio Fernández de Senespleda, didn't buy the argument this time, ruling against the club on Friday and raising the very real possibility that Barça will be unable to extend Olmo's registration by the dawn of the new year. Several other La Liga clubs, including Atlético Madrid, Athletic Club, and Sevilla, reportedly argued forcefully against Barça's case.
The club's mouthpieces in the Spanish press continually report that Olmo has no intention of invoking his exit clause and wants only to continue at Barcelona. On the other hand those same mouthpieces also continually reported the club's confidence that the judge would rule in its favor; and the club's confidence that the Nike deal would square its FFP obligations; and the club's confidence back in the summer that the sale of Barça Studios would square its FFP obligations; and the club's summer boasts about a major business deal that would square its FFP obligations, which turned out to be a piddly, embarrassing, nowhere-near-sufficient partnership with deeply disreputable American food services company Aramark; and the club's confidence that it would sign Nico Williams in the summer window; and club president Joan Laporta's confident projections that the renovation of the Camp Nou stadium, begun in summer 2023, would be completed by now. As to that last bit, the Blaugrana now seem unlikely to return to the old stadium before the end of this season, so.
Barça isn't without options at this point, but even these demonstrate how bad decisions tend to beget further bad decisions. The first, already underway, is a second lawsuit against La Liga, claiming that the league isn't competent to enforce its own FFP regulations because, the club argues, it has enforced them inconsistently. If this works, it stands to allow Olmo and Víctor to complete the season in Barcelona; if it fails—and also if it succeeds—it stands to even further alienate the club within the league, at a time when its shortage of allies has already bitten the club on the ass in the first lawsuit.
The second option, much discussed over the past few weeks, involves selling 20-year leases on a quantity of VIP seats at the still-under-construction Camp Nou. Barça estimates this move, if executed right now, could net it something on the order of €120 million—possibly enough to avert immediate-term disaster but a far cry from what the club could get if it waited and sold those seats after the completed renovation of the stadium, instead of scrambling to unload them over the next four days. The third option involves members of the club's board guaranteeing their own personal wealth and assets to cover the cost of Olmo's and Víctor's registrations; the club did this before, in 2022, to register Jules Koundé after purchasing him from Sevilla. (This last option is extremely palatable to me, an uninvolved party who thinks all of those guys have too much money anyway, but certainly is not how Barça's honcho class wants to run the club's affairs.)
The fourth option—selling off players to clear space for Olmo's and Víctor's registrations—is a possibility, but a faint one. For one thing, no player sales could be accomplished before the transfer window opens on Jan. 1; while sales could help the club to get the two players registered by Jan. 31, they couldn't foreclose the disastrous possibility of losing Olmo for nothing, should he decide to break his contract when his registration lapses. For another thing, the team is slumping lately, having dropped to third in the league in recent weeks, as manager Hansi Flick's thrilling, exhausting, all-action style tests the squad's thin depth and injury resiliency. Shortening the roster just to keep two players who are already on the team will only make the back half of the season harder at a time when the club quite literally can't afford poor results in any of a handful of different competitions. None of this means the club won't try to force out marginal players—or hire somebody to kneecap Ansu Fati with a lead pipe—if none of the other options bear fruit, but going this route would, at best, resolve one of the club's problems by deepening another.
These messes have tended to work themselves out in time to avert Barcelona's worst-case scenarios, netting it ever greater portions of ill will from the entire rest of the world. Even now, with mere days left on the timeline and the club having exhausted all but its most humiliating options, the safe bet is probably that Laporta will scramble together some kind of shady resolution that allows Barça to keep both Olmo and Víctor and go right on using them in league matches through the end of the season. La Liga itself, for all that the club and its media exponents have posed it as the enemy in all this, has and has tended to act (or restrain itself from acting) upon a vested interest in limiting the abjection of one of its flagship members.
But the margins certainly seem to be shrinking, with each successive repetition of this farce. If this isn't the time when Laporta's sweaty Howard Ratner routine finally crashes into the limits of his hustling ability, the plexiglass holding the creditors at bay has never seemed flimsier, and those creditors have never seemed more, well, willing to do what Howard Ratner's did.
UPDATE (1:47 p.m.): As Mundo Deportivo reports, if Barcelona hasn't successfully extended Olmo's and Víctor's registrations by Jan. 1, the club will not be able to register them during the January transfer window, or at all before the end of the season:
Via MD:
This is established in article 130 of the General Regulations of the RFEF, which specifies that "A footballer may be registered in only one team of a club, without the possibility of being deregistered and re-registered by the same team during the same season, except in the case of force majeure or regulatory provision."
So while the club would have until the close of the January transfer window to register new additions to the squad, it only has until Jan. 1 to solve the Olmo and Víctor problem, or else lose their services for the entire rest of the season. Yikes!
