FC Barcelona’s Fans Share The Blame For Its Financial Nightmare

This summer, the world of soccer has watched wide-eyed and open-mouthed as FC Barcelona embarked on a unique solution to its financial quagmire.

Carrying a billion dollars worth of debt and a cripplingly high wage bill, rather than tighten its belt and focus on developing young talent, the club started selling whatever it could to raise funds for more spending.

The result is outsiders now own 25% of Barcelona’s future TV rights as well as half of its future merchandising revenue and Barca Studios content arm.

This strategy defined by a willingness to bet the earnings of tomorrow on a short-term improvement has been, pretty universally, with disdain.

“The consensus within the game – from fans, from agents, even from rival clubs – is that Barcelona’s spending defies sense, that it is a doomed and deeply irresponsible gamble on their future, perhaps even a form of betrayal.” Jonathan Liew wrote in The Guardian.

“Given the rich pipeline of talent flowing from La Masia, Barcelona could simply have made a virtue of their straitened circumstances and allowed Xavi to build a new squad around the rich academy talent of Pedri, Gavi and Riqui Puig,” he added.

But Liew, like many commentators criticizing FC Barcelona’s decisions, failed to mention one crucial aspect of who was responsible for the risky strategy: fans.

Current president Joan Laporta might have devised the idea of selling off these chunks of future revenue and had his team seek out the buyers. But the structure of the club would never have allowed any of this without the approval of the supporters, or Socios as they are known.

Fans in Barcelona haven’t just voted for the leader they want to call the shots, they gave the go-ahead for each of these financial rolls of the dice to take place.

Dissenting voices have been few and the measures, which the rest of the world of soccer believes to be “deeply irresponsible” have received overwhelming support from the Socios.

But the extent to which the fans have been involved in Barcelona’s poor decision-making goes much further than this summer.

Fan approval

As an anonymous former Barcelona executive pointed out to The Athletic the fans have consistently given their approval to the spiraling debt pile.

“The red flags were the salaries; every year at a meeting with the Socios, the board and president need to present and approve the numbers. In the analysis, there was always the warning that sporting salaries were above all recommendations and that was a problem for the club,” they told the outlet.

“There was a year they said it could reach 70 percent of the budget of the club and some people were saying we need to stop to protect the club, but nobody did anything about it,” they added.

Given the choice between financial sustainability and keeping a star name like Lionel Messi, the executive said they wouldn’t be prudent.

“If you tell the fans we need to be careful with money and they can’t have Messi, the fans will say they want Messi,” they explained.

The reason Barcelona, or indeed any soccer fans, don’t tend to get the blame for this type of attitude is because they are the ones who feel the ups and downs the most. It feels wrong to criticize the person who sheds tears when a star player departs or sees the club humiliated by a rival.

But the situation at FC Barcelona is perhaps the clearest evidence that loving a soccer club most certainly does not mean you always make choices in its best interests.

Fan-ownership: An idyllic fallacy?

There are few places where the allure of fan-ownership is stronger than in the UK.

Traditionally soccer clubs in Britain have been privately-owned, a set-up that occasionally leads to disastrous situations where fans are powerless to intervene, particularly at clubs further down the leagues.

After a series of clubs went to the wall following the Covid-19 pandemic, Britain’s government decided to get involved, ordering a review of the sector.

The proposals that emerged had fan-ownership at their heart, the barriers to this model of ownership should be torn down the consensus went.

It should be said, the basis for this view was not without substance, from Swansea City to AFC Wimbledon, the examples of where fans have taken over or established a club has brought stability and success.

The caveat is that so far the examples are all of a smaller scale, we have not seen how such a model would work at a bigger team with a larger fanbase.

In England’s lower leagues, as the UK government report was able to grasp, soccer clubs are as much community assets as they are sporting teams. Fans have ambition, but they are not blinded by it, they understand, often due to bitter real-life experience, that the value of the club being in existence is greater than a risky shot at glory.

But the higher up the pyramid you go the more diluted this becomes, ambition is prized far higher than sustainability.

Supporters at Championship clubs embarking on risky spending sprees do not protest new signings bought on the promise of a better tomorrow, in the Premier League Newcastle United fans poured scorn on previous owner Mike Ashley’s perceived lack of ambition and for years Arsenal fans would sing “spend some f***king money” while debts for its stadium construction were cleared.

We would want to believe these fans would have the same attitude to financial management as Exeter City or Scarborough Athletic, but there’s a good chance they would take the same stance as the Socios.