2023-06-21 23:48:36
He Barça It is more than a club for historical reasons and for the emotional charge that it carries, but it is, above all, more than a club… football. One of the most notable and singular characteristics of FC Barcelona is its multi-sports vocation, unique in the world, with teams that stand out, in the professional field, in the most popular sports, and with a wide list of ‘amateur’ sections, among which stand out athletics, rugby, field hockey and ice hockey or skating. Many other continental clubs wear the jerseys in leagues such as roller hockey or basketball but there is none that accumulates so many sports variants and at such a high level like Barca. Without going any further, this season, the men’s and women’s football teams, the roller hockey team, the basketball team, the handball team and, very probably, the futsal team -the six professional sections- have won the league title in the domestic competition. Only one has triumphed in Europe (the women’s, the only one, on the other hand, that generates benefits by itself) but the others have reached at least the semifinals. Not counting, of course, Barça for men’s football, the emblem of the club, which in Europe has failed miserably for yet another season.
This good multi-sports health in the strictly competitive field clashes with the economic reality of the clubwith the accumulated debt of the entity and with the commitments to which the president Joan Laporta is obliged to with the Professional Football League to reduce the wage bill by more than 200 million euros. The sections, in general, are not profitable. The deficit accumulates, with some 47 million euros in the last year, with the focus on basketball, with losses of 30 million and a salary mass of 37, with salaries inherited from Bartomeu’s stage of budgetary control. This is the case of Nikola Mirotic, a franchise player who is at the top (11 million). Just before playing the ‘play-off’ in the final, it was learned that he would no longer belong to the Barça discipline, in a controversial decision but one that the club defends as essential and necessary.
This ‘bill’ could be considered a socially and sportingly justified investment and, with the necessary adjustments, assumable in the economic volume of the entity. But it is not subject to differentiated accounting and must go through the screening of the requirements of the LFPwhich does not distinguish between the waste of the first football team and the accounts of the sections, when it comes to claiming cuts to comply with financial ‘fair play’.
The sports area would be self-sufficient with the generation of around 60 million euros, something that, today, seems like an impossible undertaking. So the cuts that affect the sections have been estimated at around 20% of the wage bill. Neither the increase in ticket sales at the Palau nor the excellent track record (on the playing fields) of the women’s team can alleviate a certain feeling of end of stagewhich extends to the discomfort in the offices (which has affected the figure of the person in charge of women’s football) and the possible relegation of non-soccer spaces of Espai Barça. Will professional teams be able to be competitive at a European level after the cuts? Barça’s identity is also settled on the sports field, in order to continue being more than a club, and more than a football team.
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