Original Article by Simon Kuper [Financial Times],
Before the pandemic, Barcelona became the first club in any sport ever to surpass $1bn in annual revenues. Now its gross debt is about $1.4bn, much of it short-term. Spain’s La Liga has blocked it from spending any more money it doesn’t have. Barça has faced obstacles to giving a new contract to the world’s best and highest-paid footballer, Lionel Messi, even though he has reportedly agreed to cut his pay by half. The club has put most of its other players in an everything-must-go sale, with few takers so far. The pandemic hurt, but it was only the coup de grâce. Almost invisibly, Barcelona has been in free fall ever since the night in Berlin in June 2015 when it won its fourth Champions League final in 10 years. The club had achieved dominance on the cheap, thanks to a one-off generation of brilliant footballers from its own youth academy. Back then, Barça could afford to sign almost anybody in football. In any talent business, the most important management decision is recruitment. But Barcelona lost the “war for talent”. What went wrong?
Barça’s process for buying players is unusually messy. Rival currents inside the club each push for different signings, often without bothering to inform the head coach. Candidates for the Barça
presidency campaign on promises of the stars they will buy if elected. The sporting director of the moment will have his own views, as will Messi. The man overseeing Barcelona’s disastrous transfer policy between 2014 and 2020 was Josep Maria Bartomeu. An amiable chap, he runs a family company that makes the jet bridges that take passengers from plane to terminal. In January 2014, he went from obscure Barça vice-president to accidental president when the incumbent, Sandro Rosell, stepped down. Bartomeu was considered a mere caretaker. However, in July 2015, a month after the win in Berlin, grateful club members gave him a landslide victory in Barça’s presidential elections.
The problem was that he knew little about either football or the football business. His sporting director, the legendary Spanish goalkeeper Andoni “Zubi” Zubizarreta, had signed players like Neymar and Luis Suárez, who gelled with Messi into the “MSN” attack, the best in football. But Bartomeu soon sacked Zubi. In all, the president had five sporting directors in six years.
Barcelona’s descent began with the loss of Neymar. The Brazilian was a hyperefficient winger who ran on to Messi’s passes. Expected goals (xG) is a measure of how many goals a team is likely to score based on its quality of chances. In the 2015/16 season, Neymar by himself accounted for 1.2 xG per game, only slightly behind Messi’s staggering 1.4. But Neymar wanted to be Messi: the main man of his team. In 2017, he joined Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) for a transfer fee of €220m, a world record. Barcelona never managed to replace him. When a club sells a player for €220m, it doesn’t actually have €220m to spend. There are taxes, agents’ fees and payments by instalment. Still, every other football club in 2017 knew Bartomeu had a wad of money in his back pocket and a need for a human trophy to wave in front of Barça’s 150,000 Neymar- deprived club members. Almost any footballer will listen to an offer from Barcelona. “Sometimes you cannot reach an agreement,” Rosell told me, “but everybody sits at the table.”
In 2017, the Spanish agent Junior Minguella offered Barcelona’s board the sensational 18-year-old French forward Kylian Mbappé. But Minguella didn’t even hear back from Barça until finally a WhatsApp message arrived from a board member, Javier Bordas: “Neither the coaches nor Presi [the president] wanted him.”
Bordas would say years later that Barça’s technical staff had also rejected the young Norwegian Erling Braut Haaland, because he wasn’t considered “a player in the Barça model”. Today, Mbappé and Haaland are the two most coveted young men in football. Instead Barça targeted another young Frenchman, Borussia Dortmund’s Ousmane Dembélé. Three weeks after Neymar left, Bartomeu and another Barcelona official flew to negotiate — Dembélé’s transfer with their German counterparts in Monte Carlo, a favourite hub of the football business.
The Barça duo landed with a firm resolution, reported The New York Times: they would pay a transfer fee of at most €80m. Anything more and they would walk away. Before walking into the assigned room, the two men hugged.
But in the room, they got a surprise. The Germans said they had no time to chat, had a plane to catch, wouldn’t negotiate and wanted about double Barcelona’s budgeted sum for Dembélé. Bartomeu gave in. After all, he was president of the world’s richest club, and still something of a football virgin. He committed to pay €105m up front, plus €42m in easily obtained performance bonuses — more than Mbappé would have cost.
Not six months later, Barça paid Liverpool €160m for the Brazilian creator Philippe Coutinho. Neymar’s transfer fee had been blown, and more. A transfer fee of more than €100m should be a guarantee against failure, but neither Dembélé nor Coutinho succeeded at Barça.
Some of this may be due to the anxiety inherent in joining this club. The English striker Gary Lineker, who came from Everton in 1986, told me: “The moment I got off the aeroplane, there were hundreds of photographers and press. I was there with [Welsh striker] Mark Hughes. We’d just signed and we were told, ‘We’re going to train on the pitch today, it’s when they introduce you to the crowd,’ and we thought, well, who’s going to turn up? Maybe 30 people, maybe 40. There was about 60-odd thousand people there, just to cheer the new players and watch a bit of training.”
Lineker agreed that Hughes, who failed at Barcelona, may have been one of the players who are said to “die” of nerves in the Camp Nou. “I think he was a bit too immature. But the expectancy levels there!” No wonder Barcelona face a peculiar hurdle in the transfer market: many potential signings feel they aren’t good enough for Barça. These men are experiencing possibly justified imposter syndrome. Rosell said, “Sometimes an agent comes and says, ‘No, no, no, we are not ready.’ This is very honest. I liked it when it happened to me.” Bartomeu told me of similar rejections from “very important players now playing in other clubs”.
In early 2019, when Barcelona approached Ajax Amsterdam’s young midfielder Frenkie de Jong, a Barça fan since childhood, he was torn. He worried he wouldn’t get on to the team. Accepting an offer from Manchester City or PSG felt more realistic. He lay awake at night fretting over what might prove the biggest decision of his professional life. Reassured when Bartomeu made the effort to visit him in Amsterdam, De Jong finally decided he had to take the risk of joining Barça, rather than spend the rest of his life wondering whether he could have made it there.
Barcelona paid Ajax a transfer fee of €75m. According to football agent Hasan Cetinkaya, advising the Dutch club, this was nearly double what Ajax had initially hoped to get. Cetinkaya said: “There was tremendous pressure on Barcelona’s sporting management to get the deal done, and they really wanted to protect themselves. Those in Barcelona’s sporting leadership were so relieved that the then sporting director Pep Segura began crying as soon as the papers were written.” Barça was used to overpaying. Whereas most clubs target a type — say, a young playmaker who costs under €30m — Barcelona until 2020 shopped at the top of the market, and could afford to target an ideal. In this case, Barça didn’t want a “De Jong type”. It wanted De Jong himself. As so often when bidding for a player, it had no alternative in mind, and the selling club understood this. “You know you will pay more than another club,” shrugged Rosell.
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