Spanish giants, Barcelona’s woes has continued as its accounts presented a loss of €481m (£409m) for the end of the 2020-21 financial year.
Africa Today News, New York recals that sometime in August, Barcelona president Joan Laporta opened up on the ‘very worrying’ financial situation when disclosing that the club are €1.35bn (£1.15bn) in debt.
A summary of their accounts at the closure of the 2020-21 season shows the club recorded a 26 per cent, €224m (£191m), drop in revenue from the previous year, citing the impact of the coronavirus pandemic as a primary reason.
Barcelona has continued to maintain that the estimated impact of Covid-19 is €181m (£154m), mainly due to the inability to open both the stadium and other club facilities.
Read Also: What Messi Did For Barcelona Was Mind-Blowing – FIFA
Operating expenses increased by 19 per cent to €1.136bn (£967m), an all-time record figure at the club, while transfer income was €56m (£48m), a decrease of €92m (£78m).
What has happened here? The previous board completely mismanaged all of the funds and money they had at the club.
Laporta essentially reconfirmed they had €1.3bn in debt, and explained the reasons they got to that point. There are many reasons, but the most important are that they overspent on contracts, they overspent on salary raises, overspent on club management, on singings, and they made singings when they didn’t even have money, like Antoine Griezmann for example.
On top of that they were paying for things on credit, so they would go to banks and ask for about €100m on a loan, and they would also do this without passing it through the general assembly, which is where the members of the club would vote on these.
According to Laporta, they were all improvised, there was no financial planning, and in fact had they been a business, they’d have been in the red and would have had to file for bankruptcy, and would have been dissolved.
But because this is Barcelona, as soon as this new board came in, they refinanced the whole project, and have tried to turn things around, cutting costs wherever they can. It’s going to take them a while to sort it out.
AFRICA TODAY NEWS, NEW YORK