2023-06-23 19:37:11
BarcelonaSome members of Barça received a survey commissioned by the board of directors last April. The question was the following: “Currently, Barça is 100% owned by the members and important decisions must be approved in a general assembly or in a referendum where everyone has a voice; in your opinion, ¿ which model would you prefer for FCB?” The partners could choose between staying the same, being a Sports Limited Liability Company (SAE) or opting for a mixed model in which at least 51% of the shares were still in the hands of the partners. The survey came at a time when the board was still looking for formulas to pay for the remodeling of the Camp Nou but growing the entity’s total debt beyond 3,000 million.
The sporting successes of this last season are mixed with the juggling of Joan Laporta’s board in the offices. Despite the fact that in the electoral campaign, after which he won a resounding victory, Laporta promised to fix the club, the hole left by Josep Maria Bartomeu has grown. In order to register players or to be able to close the Espai Barça project, finally underway after months of delay, it was necessary to find solutions of all kinds. The question commissioned by the board, which would state that “it’s always good to know what the partners think”, but that they have “no intention of changing the ownership model”, set off the alarms. Is the club’s historic ownership model in which members have the final say at risk? It is a debate that, in fact, already existed before, but in a more covert form.
“We have had the debate on the club’s model for years, but it had never been so clearly transferred to the members”, says a manager of Bartomeu’s leadership, who admits to the ARA that if the question was not asked it was for fear of being unpopular. After the pandemic, with so many debts and with the memory of the bad management of the previous president, Laporta has indeed done it. The current leader, however, has always defended that everything will remain the same.
Many experts, such as Marc Ciria, Francesc Trilla or Gonzalo Bernardos, on the other hand, say that with this level of debt, Barça is heading towards the end of the road where it will be necessary to open the door to private capital and modify the ownership system. Others, such as the journalist Simon Kuper, who followed the last months of Bartomeu’s tenure from within the club, affirm that “the ownership system is one of the last strongholds of ‘being more than a club'”. “If it ceased to belong to the members, it would no longer be more than a club. They will defend it to the end, selling other assets. And if it were to allow the entry of shareholders, it would become the Bayern model,” he predicts.
Within the Laporta government it is admitted that, with a debt that does not stop growing, to be able to guarantee the future of the club and continue to compete against the clubs with the support of states, this is an option that is valued. Some of the heavyweights who left the project, such as Ferran Reverter, advocated dealing with the matter and evaluating it. And it always ends up talking about the famous Bayern model.
The famous Bayern Munich model
What does this model consist of? In Germany there is the so-called 50+1 rule, in which professional football clubs must remain in the hands of the partners, who must own at least 51% of the shares. There are exceptions, such as entities that were already founded many years ago within companies, such as Bayer Leverkusen or Wolfsburg, owned by Volkswagen.
“This formula allows investors to come in but the partners continue to decide the future,” explains Kuper. Bayern is the most successful case. In 2002 the Bavarian club created a joint stock company, Bayern AG, to manage the first football team. 75% of this company is owned by old Bayern. In other words, from the partners. But 25% of the other shares were divided in three equal parts between three large private companies: Audi, Adidas and Allianz. “The funny thing about their case is that they are three giant companies, all three Bavarian companies. Can Barça do the same with local companies?”, asks Kuper. Bayern is a financially stable club, like almost all other German clubs. Walking arm in arm with three giants, however, the Bavarian club is far ahead of the others.
Trying to imitate this model would be a new adventure in Spain, where all the clubs are private except for four: Barça, Real Madrid, Athletic Club and Osasuna, four institutions that were considered exceptions when at the beginning of the 90s he made the new law of the sport. “If Barça takes this step forward, defending that the partners would continue to rule in the end would allow it not to do so much harm, but they would obviously lose power. In addition, if you take this step there is no going back,” points out Kuper, who gives for the fact that in the case of privatizing part of the club, the shareholders would not be local, as is the case with Bayern. They would be international for two reasons: Barça’s market value is much greater than Bayern’s, which would force them to pay higher figures, and the Catalan business fabric is less powerful than the Bavarian one.
The market value of Barça, a club with debts but with great assets, means that a hypothetical sale of almost 50% of the club would mean investing more than 3.5 billion euros. A similar opinion to that of Jaume Llopis, who was part of the Espai Barça commission and left, dissatisfied with the management of the club. Llopis explained to the media that Catalonia does not have giants such as Audi, Adidas or Allianz. And Barça has a very divided social mass, unlike Bayern.
Laporta will defend the model, an emotional affair
“Laporta will hold out as much as he can so as not to turn the club into a public limited company,” Llopis says. Different people in the lawyer’s environment think the same: to go down in history as the president who changed the model would be a very hard blow, so he will look for other solutions. “The debt is growing, it will continue to sell assets. In fact, with the famous levers, limited companies have been set up in which Barça is a minority shareholder, and there has been a lack of transparency to know how the board of directors has been chosen,” he explains. In other words, by selling leveraged assets, Bayern’s model has already been explored on a small scale in some ways. Llopis believes that the Bavarians’ model, with 75% of the shares in the hands of the partners, would be Laporta’s last resort if he cannot find other solutions.
Changing the club’s ownership system would surely be the most drastic change in the club’s history. Not only in the emotional sphere. The Bayern model would still allow shareholders to vote on some key issues, but there is a big difference between selling 49% of the shares and selling 25%. If the 49% is sold, a minimal division among the partners would turn the assemblies into an oil base for private shareholders. If the institution is 100% privatized, an option that seems remote, members would no longer vote or elect the board. This would be decided at the shareholders’ meeting of a club that would become an SAE. In other words, to be managed as a company in which the priority would be to achieve profits. In addition, the managers would be paid, unlike now, who do not have a salary and must answer with their assets in case of bad management.
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