“It’s not football, it’s La Liga” goes the marketing slogan – and La Liga boss Javier Tebas has just given it new meaning. He is refusing to allow FC Barcelona to register a raft of expensive signings ahead of the new league season – which starts on Friday – on the grounds that the club has spent much more money on buying them than it actually has.
Tebas has a point. To finance its new gaggle of stars, FC Barcelona has effectively boarded a time machine and zoomed off to drink the blood of its future self. But Barca president Joan Laporta has his own euphemism for this fascinating act of self-cannibalisation through private equity deals: he calls it “pulling economic levers”. Pull the other one, Joan!
But what if Polish goal fiend Robert Lewandowski really cannot play football for Barcelona this domestic season, and pockets his salary of €23-million anyway, for nine months of luxury gardening leave? That would be weird – but this is the motherland of Joan Miró, Salvadore Dali and Pedro Almodóvar; surreal things happen in Spain.
So we might see Lewandowski and Raphinha and Jules Koundé forming a mime troupe on a corner of Barcelona’s Las Ramblas. After each performance of absurdist one-bounce they might pass around a busker’s hat the size of a portapool to help offset their unearned wages.
Weirdly enough, Laporta is actually the voice of reason on Planet Barça. He recently recaptured the presidency with a campaign promise to restore sanity and stability. The structural problem working against him is the dangerously democratic nature of Spanish football. As in the US and too many democracies, voter pressure on elected leaders incentivises irrational short-termism, at least in countries where prudence and caution are not culturally prized. (Clubs are democratic in Germany, too, but the presidents tend to get re-elected by balancing the books, not by selling the family silver.)
And in Barcelona and Real Madrid, the voting club members of socios (or socis, in Catalan) are kept sweet by ticket prices that are massively cheaper than Big 6 prices in the Premier League. In both cities, the socios are mainly drawn from the elites. Many of them attend games rarely, and often turn a tidy profit by hawking their season tickets to tourists.
When I attended a particularly venomous clasico at the Santiago Bernabeu in 2011, I had managed to rent a season-ticket seat right in front of the corner flag, amid a thicket of baying ultras. But nowadays, at any given Barcelona home fixture, as many as 25% of the fans in attendance are tourists. The club even provides an online broking platform on which socis can rent their allotted seat to a visiting Barça freak from Boston or Busan or Bangalore, who then spends €100 on a shirt and a stadium tour and a very tiny jamon roll.
There’s nothing morally or economically wrong with this model, of course. The explosion of Spain’s tourism industry in recent decades has helped decimate poverty. In 1960, Spain’s per capita income was $400 and in 2008 it peaked at $35 000, before the financial crisis reined it in.
Nearly 90-million travellers came to Spain in 2019 – more than double its population – sustaining millions of workers. The engine of all that money is the unrivalled Spanish promise: to be Europe’s best package of sunshine, culture, football and food.
It’s significant that it is precisely the football part of that package that sets Spain apart from Italy and France. Sure, those countries also boast mighty football clubs, but none to rival the pure grandeur of the Spanish giants.
And Laporta’s massive gamble this season is essentially a bet that pure grandeur pays for itself, and then some.
Hence FC Barcelona, Laporta believes, has no choice but to keep buying players it cannot afford, in order to keep its own unrivalled promise to the world: that it is més que un club (more than a club).
But Tebas, over at La Liga headquarters, begs to differ. Between the two of them, they’re keeping it surreal.
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