Barcelona president Joan Laporta explained the financial situation of the club during a press conference on Monday afternoon. Laporta emphasized to the media present that the previous administration under Josep Maria Bartomeu had made a ‘huge mess’ of it. “Right now, Barça’s debt amounts to a staggering 1.35 billion euros,” Laporta confirmed.
“Yes, really, that’s how bad and worrying is the situation of this club. The financial situation is dramatic,” said Laporta on Monday afternoon. The chairman said that the club represents a negative value of no less than 451 million euros. “The first thing we did when we got started was take out a loan of eighty million euros. Otherwise we wouldn’t even be able to pay the salaries anymore, and at that point the club would have been paid 50% of the TV rights revenue in advance.”
The worrying numbers are due to financial mismanagement under Bartomeu, who in turn was extremely critical of Laporta’s policies in an open letter last week, according to Laporta. The Barcelona president who left in October has long been publicly criticized by his successor Laporta and has had enough. Bartomeu claimed in the open letter to have had enough plans to help Barcelona on top of the corona crisis, but that Laporta simply did not take advantage of them.
Bartomeu: ‘Why did Barca give away 16.5 million to Neymar?’
Read the open letter from Josep Maria Bartomeu here.
On Monday, Laporta responded to Bartomeu’s letter. “I’ve read it and it’s all lies. No one can escape his responsibilities. What they have done is a total defrauding of all the sociopaths of this club,” Laporta said at the press conference. “The previous board simply ignored financial controls. As in Barçagate, other bills were ‘split’ to avoid having to go through supervision. “We are running as it should have been. That has also happened with the plans for the reconstruction of the Camp Nou. They keep lying and denying. I can’t stand it anymore, so I had to respond to last week’s false allegations.”
Laporta blames the previous club management for promising huge salaries to players. “It made no sense what they were doing. Only the short term was considered. They took huge risks for this club just so that they could quickly achieve success of their own. But even with all those risks, she didn’t succeed. It was impossible at all, they spend much more than came in, even before corona.” Laporta revealed that the costs in the sports budget amounted to 617 million euros. “That is 25 to 30 percent more than the costs incurred by our competitors. Salary costs totaled 103 percent of the club’s total income.”
“I’m sorry to keep bashing you with all these details and numbers, but it’s necessary to clarify what a mess it has been made here. It’s now up to us to clean up that huge mess and to build a healthy and stable future for this club. We still want to start rebuilding Camp Nou next year, but we will have to recalculate all those plans. The previous board also thought the Estadi Johan Cruyff for 4 million euros to build. That cost more than 25 million euros,” said Laporta.