Barcelona held a board meeting earlier this week to finalize the financial figures for the 2023-2024 season. They will also draw up a budget for the 2024-2025 season. All will be presented to the club's owners on October 19.
During the meeting, President Joan Laporta emphasized the team's resilience in the context of the financial crisis. In addition, the Camp Nou owner also listed new record revenues such as player sales and commercial revenue (about 320 million Euros). Laporta also did not forget to mention that the team had cut 170 million Euros in salary and recorded a profit of 12 million Euros.
However, being away from Camp Nou for a while has left the club with a loss of around €100 million. Not only that, the club also recorded a loss of €141 million (before tax) on the project at its subsidiary Bridgeburg Invest (Barca Vision). Therefore, the actual figure should be a net loss of €91 million.
In Barcelona's upcoming direction, boosting revenue from player sales will be focused on, considering it an important annual budget source. Not only are the stars losing form, the team also thoroughly sells young players to maximize profits.
Last summer, Barcelona hoped to sell the rights to Barca Studios and raise around 100 million euros. However, the project failed and one of the financial levers they had drawn up collapsed. After changing the name of the project several times, from Barca Studios, to Barca Media and now Barca Vision, the team is still struggling in this area.
In the period 2022-2023, the value of Barca Vision is about 400 million Euros. This number was once commented as unrealistic because there are many virtual values such as the amount of money that investors publicly contributed that never appeared. Barcelona owns 51% of the shares in this company.
The loss recorded at Barca Vision will have a significant impact on the club's wage bill. In recent years, Barcelona have had a headache every summer with player registrations. In the most recent transfer window, the team said goodbye to Ilkay Gundogan, Joao Felix, Joao Cancelo, Sergi Roberto and Marcos Alonso. They then brought in Dani Olmo and Pau Viktor.
Of these two new recruits, only Dani Olmo has been given the privilege of "sneaking" through the narrow financial door, from which he can officially play for the Camp Nou team. The reason is that the former Leipzig star is "standing in" for the injured Andreas Christensen. When Christensen returns, it is unclear what Olmo's situation will be.
In a press conference on September 3, Laporta said Barcelona needed another 60 million euros in wage space so that all players arriving last summer could be registered normally.
There are many ways for Barcelona to handle this, the easiest to do is to renegotiate with Nike so that the sportswear company increases the annual fee the team receives. Simply put, Barca wants to receive future profits in advance to solve the current problem.
Also in September, Laporta said that Nike's upcoming contract with Barcelona would be the biggest shirt sponsorship deal in history. Nike has yet to comment.
Back to the financial plan date of October 19, it is likely that Barcelona's bosses will approve all the plans being submitted because it states that the budget for the period 2024-2025 will increase thanks to the commercial sector. As for the salary fund, the team will ensure to maintain it at 500 million Euros. The final profit is only about 5 million Euros, but at this time, not losing is already too lucky for Blaugrana.
At this time, the team's management is hoping that Camp Nou will return to operation soon so that the team can increase revenue. If it returns on January 26, 2025, all plans will not be disrupted. The new capacity of Camp Nou is expected to be 104,000 seats, but to reach this maximum capacity, it will still take until 2026 to fully complete.
