Thebes believes Laporta's numbers

BarcelonaThe real estate bubble had catastrophic consequences for Spanish football. Many clubs depended on construction companies or businesses linked to the property sector that went bankrupt, leading to global non-payments to players and social security. In 2012, the Spanish government said enough was enough and threatened to intervene in the football business. To protect themselves, the clubs decided to create a mandatory regulation that not only required accounts to balance, but also demanded that entities demonstrate at the start of the season that they would have sufficiently good budgets to pay all debts for the season. At that moment, financial fair play was born.

The regulation was applied instantly and was modified over the years to adapt to the needs of the clubs, the demands of the market, and the cunning of some leaders who looked for every possible loophole to bypass it. But this preventive economic control, despite being quite strict, went relatively unnoticed in the media until 2020, following the pandemic, when Barça got into trouble. Since then, it has been one of the star topics. So much so that the entity chaired by Javier Tebas has multiplied the informational sessions to explain how

financial fair play works and to justify the adjustments that have been made before the various transfer markets began.

While Real Madrid was shrewd during the pandemic and managed to weather the storm without losses in its balance sheet, Barça was the victim of the bad economic decisions made by former president Bartomeu and, in 2021, of the surprising decision by Laporta's new board to reformulate the accounts and record 555 million in losses in a single financial year. A burden that has weighed for five years, as economic control not only takes into account the current season's budget but also deducts previous losses. Therefore, for ten transfer windows – five summer and five winter – Barça has had difficulties registering players

and has had to resort to levers, personal guarantees, the 3:1 rule, or the favors of a League that, in some cases, has been lenient with the Catalan club.

Barça has had difficulties registering playersfair play financial cannot reveal confidential figures, but reading between the lines, it is guessed that Barça is on the right track. So much so that at Camp Nou, where they have also done the calculations, they already take it for granted. "And they are not mistaken," confirms one of the sources consulted from the employers' association.

VIP seats, Camp Nou reopening, and Lewandowski's departure

'Vip' seats, Camp Nou reopening and Lewandowski's departureThese operations not only allow us to enter the 1:1 rule, but also to have some margin to register new players. For now, the figure has not yet been disclosed, but between everything Barça has already accumulated and the hypothetical departures of players like Marc Casadó, Jules Koundé or Alejandro Balde – for whom offers will be heard – the club and La Liga foresee a summer like before the pandemic. If until recently in the corridors of the employers' association they insisted that Barça "is very screwed up", now they say that "it will be able to sign well".