Can Barcelona sign players? Barcelona's financial situation explained

Liam Williams Updated: 19 Jun 25 09:34

Every season, reports emerge that Barcelona are looking to strengthen their squad with expensive transfers, and every season, reports emerge that Barcelona are in dire financial trouble.

Technically, both are true, but Barcelona’s financial situation is extremely complicated and has been for a number of years. Below, we look into the biggest questions around the club heading into the 2025 summer transfer window.

Can Barcelona sign players?

According to club president Joan Laporta, Barcelona will be able to sign players. Laporta said recently: “I believe we’ll be able to sign players; we’ll be at 1:1.”

1:1 refers to the rule in Spain that says clubs can spend a euro for every euro they raise, as opposed to being forced to use part of their income to pay off debts.

This does, however, suggest the club will only be able to sign players using income raised from player sales. The likes of Marc-Andre ter Stegen, Ronald Araujo, Ansu Fati, Clement Lenglet and Inaki Pena have all been linked with moves away from the club.

Can Barcelona register Dani Olmo?

After the National Sports Council ruled that La Liga and the Spanish football federation did not have the power to revoke the licence of Dani Olmo, as well as that of Pau Victor, Barcelona have been able to register Olmo.

La Liga themselves confirmed to The Athletic that Olmo and Victor are registered to play for Barcelona in Liga until the end of their contracts, though an appeal on the decision is waiting to be heard, as La Liga argue that Barcelona did not have space in their salary cap to register Olmo and Victor in January 2025.

Barcelona financial problems explained

Despite their success on the pitch in recent years, the picture behind the scenes for Barcelona still looks uncertain.

Barca’s financial woes can perhaps be traced back to August 2021, when Lionel Messi shockingly departed the club.

A year earlier, Messi had made his intentions to leave the club on a free transfer clear, though the club blocked the move and said the only way he could leave was if someone activated his release clause.

Club president Josep Maria Bartomeu resigned that October, and Messi waited to discover Joan Laporta’s plans before deciding his future.

Even after Messi’s contract expired, the club worked on plans to keep the Argentine at the club, which involved a 50 per cent pay cut and a five-year deal, although one that would essentially allow him to leave for MLS after two years.

While Messi had agreed to the deal, the rug was pulled from under him, having been told the move couldn’t be sanctioned under La Liga’s financial rules.

The best player to have played the game would leave the club where’d be played since he was a child, and Barcelona would set about trying to offload other high earners.

The likes of Samuel Umtiti, Antoine Griezmann, Gerard Pique, Sergio Busquets, Philippe Coutinho, Jordi Alba and Miralem Pjanic were all thought to be on more than €300,000 a week with their wage bill pushing an eye-watering €7,000,000 in 2019/20 and still clearing €6,000,000 the following year. For context, Manchester City’s wage bill that year was less than half of that of Barcelona’s.

The club were already heavily in debt before the pandemic struck, but that forced the club to take action.

Laporta’s plan to save the club, whose debt was in excess of €1,000,000,000, was to pull a series of financial levers, which essentially involved the sale of future revenue such as TV money. Barcelona sold 25% of their next 25 years’ worth of domestic TV revenue for an immediate cash injection.

Another ‘lever’ came from ‘Barca Studios’ which had attracted €200,000,000 of investment, most of which never materialised. There was also ‘Barca Vision, launched as a spin-off company with the plan of floating it on the NASDAQ stock exchange with a valuation of $1,000,000,000, but the plan fell through 12 months later.

In doing so, the club raised around €800,000,000 and was able to refinance many of its existing loans from the Bartomeu era, but the collapse of the ‘Barca Vision’ plan meant that Barcelona had hugely overstated what they were worth, forcing La Liga to bring their salary cap down further.

While the manoeuvres allowed the club to sign top players, including Robert Lewandowski, Jules Kounde and Raphinha, whose combined salaries approached £1,000,000 a week, it may have created future problems.

Barcelona went ahead with their expensive plan to renovate Camp Nou, playing at the much smaller Montjuic stadium, further reducing the club’s matchday income.

Victor Font, who lost to Laporta in the 2021 presidential election, accused his rival of doing the same thing his predecessor did in kicking the can down the road, but the club has greatly reduced its wage bill in recent years.

But despite the cost-cutting, the club wasn’t out of the woods as recently as 12 or even six months ago. Dani Olmo was frequently in the headlines and rarely for anything he did on the pitch.

Olmo wasn’t available to be registered at the start of the season due to salary cap restrictions, but injuries to other players meant the club could register the Spain star in the short-term.

It was another example of kicking the can down the road. As 2024 came to an end, Olmo’s registration expired and an extension was rejected. It took an intervention by the National Sports Council to allow Olmo to play.

The latest move to generate revenue came when the club sold a number of VIP seats for the renovated Camp Nou, but reports suggest they already need to have been built in order to count towards the 2024/25 accounts, which Laporta claimed they had.

If reports and statements from the club are to be believed, Barcelona are on a firmer financial footing, even if they have sacrificed much of their future income, though La Liga may continue to argue otherwise.