FC Barcelona Board Blame La Liga President Tebas For Economic Situation And Rule Out De Jong Sale

FC Barcelona’s board have blamed La Liga president Javier Tebas for his part in the club’s economic woes and denied that this has prompted the potential sale of Frenkie de Jong.

Tebas, a known and self-confessed Real Madrid fan, has angered Barca and their supporters for constantly talking about the club in the media and pouring cold water on its aspirations in the transfer market given their delicate predicament of navigating debts circling $1.5 billion.

Tebas stated that Barca cannot sign players such as Bayern Munich striker Robert Lewandowski when probed earlier this week, which forced president Joan Laporta to fire back in the press.

“I would ask him to abstain from making comments in the sense of if Barca can or cannot sign a player because it’s clearly damaging Barca’s interests,” Laporta said on Wednesday.

“Furthermore, I don’t know if he makes these statements voluntarily or involuntarily, but if he makes them voluntarily it is a clear sign that he wants to harm Barca’s interests. And if he makes these statements involuntarily, it is further proof of his verbal incontinence and this desire of protagonism that he has,” Laporta went on.

Speaking to RAC 1 on Friday morning, Barca’s economic vice president ​​Eduard Romeu has also taken a dig at the Spanish top flight chief and the investment fund agreement he has tried to pressure the club into signing up for.

“We have said enough with CVC and Tebas,” Romeu revealed. “This man is co-responsible for the situation that Barca is going through.”

“He has looked the other way and has worked against the interests of the club. The easy thing is to accept the agreement. We will do everything that is necessary to redirect the club, we are capable of playing with the system,” Romeu vowed.

“We don’t want to mortgage ourselves for more than 25 years and the figure would be close, with another fund, to the €270mn ($290mn) offered by CVC,” Romeu continued, in a nod to other possible agreements the club has to sell part of Barca Studios and Barca Licensing & Merchandising.

“What cannot be is that you always have to go through Javier Tebas’s funnel. From an economic point of view, the agreement with CVC is a bad deal for Barca,” he concluded on this.

As for the potential transfer of Frenkie de Jong, with Manchester United said to have opened negotiations for the star midfielder, Romeu stressed that the club hasn’t “budgeted a single euro for the sale of a player” which would make any offloading of the young Dutchman purely a “technical issue”.