Laporta has accumulated his second consecutive year in the red

BarcelonaExactly three months after the end of the 2024-2025 financial year, Barça released its official figures this Tuesday. Despite Joan Laporta's board separating ordinary results from extraordinary results, a move that is irrelevant from an accounting perspective, the reality is that the Blaugrana club closed last year with a €17 million loss. This represents a €37 million negative deviation from the 2024-2025 budget, which projected a profit of €20 million. Thus, Laporta will have closed for the second consecutive year with a loss. The previous year saw a loss of €91 million. But the social debate among the Barça fans prompted by these figures is, for now, almost nonexistent. This Wednesday there's a Barça-PSG Champions League match, and when the ball is in play, everything else takes a backseat. A good communicative move.

Barça's recent salary cap update in La Liga already suggested bad economic news at the close. La Liga reduced the Barcelona salary cap by 112 million euros., which means that the club has suffered a deviation in the value of this figure from the budget presented to the management during the winter. The League itself pointed out as the main reason for this deviation the fact that Barça's current auditor, Crowe, had not yet validated the lever for the seats. VIP Camp Nou because Hansi Flick's team has yet to play there again. But the seats alone don't account for the entire deviation. In fact, according to ARA, Crowe finally allowed more than 40 million euros in revenue from the seats to be included at the end of the financial year. VIPAnd yet, the club has still made losses.

Laporta's board will have to explain what they attribute the negative €17 million to. In the official statement released last night, they limited themselves to mentioning this figure and pointing out that the result of income and expenses that they consider ordinary has been a positive €2 million. Furthermore, they also announced that they have budgeted €4 million in profit for the 2025-2026 financial year, in which they expect to "reach new records in sponsorship and merchandising revenue, as well as the gradual return to Camp Nou."

139 million in accumulated losses

These €17 million losses are added to the €122 million accumulated losses Laporta had incurred since returning to the presidency in 2021. This brings the total to €139 million. The first financial year, affected by the coronavirus pandemic, the catastrophic legacy of Josep Maria Bartomeu's tenure, and the depreciation of the value of various players imposed by Laporta, resulted in losses of €481 million. This burden began to be reversed the following year, which ended with €98 million in profits, boosted by the sale to Sixth Street of 10% of La Liga's television rights for the next 25 years.

The 2022-2023 financial year was also full of levers. Barça posted a profit of 352 million in a year in which it sold an additional 15% of the television rights and 49% of Barça Studios, a thorn in its side due to the various defaults of investors, the inability to provide value to the project and the depreciation requested (without the club's approval) by the previous auditor, Grant Thornton. In fact, the 2023-2024 financial year ended with a loss of 91 million euros due to the aforementioned non-payments.

Outrage in the Barcelona community

On the other hand, Barça's statement released Tuesday also states that the delegate members' assembly, at which these numbers will be approved, will be held online on Sunday, October 19th. This has sparked outrage among much of the Barça community, which just a few days earlier had joined forces to send a letter to Laporta's board demanding an in-person or hybrid meeting. "There's no justification; it's restricting participation, democracy, and transparency," Ricard Faura, one of the signatories of the letter on behalf of the Fem Barça group, told ARA.

"In one of the many meetings we held with the club, President Laporta committed to the representatives of the groups to holding the assemblies in a hybrid format," Faura continues. Víctor Font, the second-most voted candidate in the last elections, also gave his opinion. In this case, in X: "The delegate members deserve to be able to participate in the assemblies in person. As has always been done. Being a democratic club means giving a personal voice to the representatives of the club's owners. We will fight to ensure that this becomes an obligation for whoever governs Barça."