Over the past couple of years, Barcelona’s financial problems have become the talk of the town. For the first time, the Catalans faced a budget deficit in the midst of a pandemic, when the club was left without income from television broadcasts and ticket sales. When the financial crisis turned into a gaming crisis, the fans immediately remembered the then president of Barca, Josep Bartomeu, all his transfer mistakes, which cost the blue garnets hundreds of millions of euros.

The Spanish manager was made extreme and soon forced to resign, and was replaced by Joan Laporta. Under him, Barcelona began to do things differently, trying to get rid of the club’s reputation as a spender … However, a recent study unexpectedly showed that the Catalans were not so bad.

Barça sensationally turned out to be the most economical giant in Europe. Was Bartomeu fired for nothing?

The sad legacy of Bartomeu

During his seven years in Catalonia (2014-2020), Josep Bartomeu is believed to have done everything to plunge Barcelona into a deep crisis. The Spanish entrepreneur increased the team’s expenses every year, balancing them with great difficulty – the fragile balance could be broken by one strong blow, which eventually caused the coronavirus. Under the former president, the blue garnets not only bought newcomers dearly, but also provided them with insanely large contracts: Barça’s payroll by 2020 was inflated to incredible proportions.

Left in the course of the 2019/20 season without several income items at once, the Catalans were forced to solve the problem radically. The club began to cut the salaries of key players, and some of them had to be got rid of altogether – it was because of this, in particular, that Lionel Messi later left Barcelona. With the advent of the new president, the blue garnets began to sign players for free: in two years, Eric Garcia, Sergio Aguero, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Memphis Depay, Marcos Alonso, Frank Kessier, Andreas Christensen and Hector Bellerin joined the team. The list of names is more than solid!

Joan Laporta / Photo: © Quality Sport Images / Contributor / Getty Images Sport / Gettyimages.ru

Of course, there is no need to compare these deals with Barca’s transfers under Bartomeu. Under him, the Catalans, in particular, made three of the most expensive purchases in history Examples: Philipe Coutinho from Liverpool cost the club 135 million euros, Ousmane Dembele from Borussia – 125 million, and Antoine Griezmann from Atlético – 120 Now only the second one remains in the team: the Brazilian managed to be sold with grief in half for 20 million, and the Frenchman was leased to the former owners for 10 million.

The most economical grand

It seems that with all this spending, it will take Barca years to at least return to the plus. After all, Bartomeu’s mistakes are not limited to just three names! However, a recent CIES study showed that the situation of the Spanish club is actually far from deplorable.

The Football Observatory studied all the transfers of teams from the top 5 European leagues over the past 10 years and compared their real spending on newcomers with the objective value of these players at the time of purchase. The CIES numbers differ from the Transfermarkt data: here the price tags are given to the players not by people, but by computer algorithms, so the results should be more accurate. As a result of this comparison, scientists calculated two parameters: the absolute difference between costs and price (in million euros) and relative (as a percentage).

Memphis Depay / Photo: © David Ramos / Staff / Getty Images Sport / Gettyimages.ru

The conclusion of the study was quite unexpected. Catalan spenders are in second place in the CIES ranking… from the bottom. In absolute terms (+47 million), Barcelona is second only to one European team – Atletico (+82 million), and among the giants it turns out to be the most economical. The most wasteful top clubs on the continent were Manchester United (-238m), Juventus (-234m) and PSG (-162m). More restrained in spending, Liverpool (-56 million) and Bayern (-52 million) found themselves on the 19th and 22nd lines.

However, it is important to understand that Barcelona’s transfer costs at the same time turned out to be the second in Europe (1.465 billion versus 1.594 billion for Manchester United), so it is more correct to compare the blue garnet with the rest of the teams in relative terms. But even in percentage terms, Barça showed a decent result: the club fell into the very middle of the ranking with a profit of 3%, overtaking even Tottenham with its greedy president Levy (1%) and Brighton sharpened for sales (0%).

However, it would still be wrong to rehabilitate Bartomeu on the basis of these statistics. Firstly, Josep’s main sin was the execution of insane contracts, which played a key role in the club’s crisis. Secondly, it seems that Laporta helped the team to get into the plus. In two years, the president accomplished the impossible by signing players worth a couple of hundred million euros as free agents: not all of these transfers brought great benefits to the club, but they definitely helped to restore the nominal balance. And there is already reason to hope that soon Barcelona will return to its previous level in terms of football.