Барселонагийн өрийн хэмжээ хоёр тэрбум еврод дөхөж, санхүүгийн байдал амаргүй хэвээр байна

Getting a handle on Barcelona’s finances in recent years has been akin to catching water, a thankless and broadly bemusing task.

The club’s 2025-26 accounts, due to be approved by members on September 19, but already obtained by The Athletic, add another chapter to the canon.

Barca tottered past €1billion (£859m; $1.1bn) in revenues last season, only the second football club ever to do so, behind Real Madrid. Yet they still failed to turn a profit, losing €17.8m post-tax, while a costly remodelling of their Camp Nou home remains unfinished and debts continue to pile high.

On the pitch, they wrapped up a second consecutive La Liga title in May in the best way possible, beating Madrid 2-0 at home to ensure their El Clasico rivals couldn’t catch them. Hansi Flick’s side fell at the quarter-final stage of the Champions League but won the Supercopa de Espana again.

That latest league title came in the wake of presidential elections in March, where Joan Laporta successfully saw off a challenge from Victor Font, just as he had when ascending back to the presidency in 2021. Laporta is now into his sixth consecutive year at the helm and 13th in total, having also held the post between 2003 and 2010.

His re-election came on the back of a turbulent few years, ones where Barca’s finances were as much a story as their football. Things are a sight calmer than they were at one stage, but the actions taken by Laporta to right the ship, while still trying to compete with football’s elite, will cast a long shadow.

Barcelona have long been one of the largest earners in football, and so provide ample proof that big income isn’t synonymous with good financial health. Five years ago, they made the fourth-highest revenues in the sport, yet they also posted a world-record loss.

Half a decade on, revenue is up substantially and, even after adjusting for some quirks of Barca’s own introduction (in their presentation of revenues, they include profits from transfers, which just isn’t how we play cricket around here), they still topped the €1billion mark for the first time last season.

The club finally returned to their famous home last November, but only at a significantly reduced capacity of 45,401. That went up to over 62,000 in March of this year, still a long way below the 105,000 the ground will welcome when works are finally complete — which Barca now hope will be in 2028.

Even with just a partial return, last season’s figures clearly show why Barca embarked on such an expensive project in the first place.

Capacity during the first four months back at the Camp Nou was actually lower than had been available to the club at the Estadi Olimpic in Montjuic, their temporary home of more than two years, so gate receipts last season only rose by €3million (three per cent). Yet the return to even an unfinished Camp Nou meant hospitality takings rocketed, up by over €30m from the €21.1m achieved on Montjuic over 2024-25.

Takings from club members improved too, up from €31.6million to €40.1m, though the latter still sits well below the €65.5m peak achieved in 2022-23, the final season before the Camp Nou works began. Their completion will engender an improvement in takings across the board; Barca expect Espai Barca, the overarching project which takes in the Camp Nou extension and improvement, will generate an additional €250m in annual revenues once finished.

Those extra revenues will be needed, as the project continues to be an extremely expensive one.

Before getting into those costs, it’s worth looking at what else got Barca to that extraordinary revenue figure. By far the club’s largest earnings stem from commercial revenue streams, where income has exploded in recent years, increasing by €200million between 2019 and 2025.

Huge sponsorship deals with Nike and Spotify have driven Barca’s commercial income up to €564.1million, a massive sum that, again, only shares a ballpark with Real Madrid’s. The Nike kit manufacturing deal now runs to 2038 following a renewal two years ago. Spotify’s deal, which includes naming rights for the Camp Nou, was renewed in October 2025 for a further four seasons.

Alongside those, Barca make massive amounts from merchandise, reflecting the club’s global appeal. Barca Licensing and Merchandising, a commercial subsidiary, banked €189.5million last season, a €39m (26 per cent) increase in a year and up €137.8m from just five years prior.

The club’s commercial income is even more praiseworthy once we strip out the impact of one-off, Personal Seat License sales (PSLs). In January 2025, Barca set about selling off 30-year rights to 9,600 VIP seats in the remodelled Camp Nou. They banked €71.6million in 2024-25, with a further €28.4m to be recorded in future seasons.

Some €9.5million of that landed in 2025-26 commercial income, so the latter holding steady overall means the €62m drop in PSL income was made up by improvements elsewhere. Those PSL sales have been likened to the palancas, or levers, favoured by Laporta in recent years, a short-term tool used to help Barca remain competitive and within La Liga’s strict spending rules. Their one-off nature certainly fits that definition, and it’s debatable whether they should be included as revenue at all as a result, but last season did see their impact on the top line reduce dramatically.

If PSL sales have served to bring forward future revenues, a separate palanca continues to give them away, depressing Barca’s earning power in the process.

Barca’s TV income in 2025-26 was €244.6million, hardly a small sum. Yet it sits well shy of the club-record €298.1m achieved in 2019-20, with little realistic chance of getting back there any time soon. Barca only made the Champions League quarter-finals last season, though the size of the prize pot on offer from UEFA still meant, we reckon, that they earned around €99m in broadcast income from the competition.

That leaves around €145million from elsewhere, with €136m accruing to the men’s first team, principally via the successful defence of their La Liga title. Yet earnings from their domestic league are restricted by the decision, taken in 2022, to sell 25 per cent of 25 years’ worth of domestic TV money to private equity firm Sixth Street for €667.5million, a huge initial sum but one which now gets eaten into with each passing year.

La Liga is yet to release distribution amounts for 2025-26 but, based on previous seasons and inferences which can be drawn from Barca’s latest figures, the amount the club must hand over to Sixth Street is in the region of €40million per year.

The massive cash injection of four years ago was much needed, but Barca will be paying it back and more over the next two decades. Last year, La Liga inked a slightly improved broadcast rights package which will commence from the 2027-28 season — likely increasing the amount Barca have to fork over to the private equity firm.

Enjoying the full weight of the financial benefits which will flow from a completed Espai Barca is paramount then, not least because, even with €1billion-plus revenues, Barcelona still fail to turn a profit.

Last season, the deficit held largely steady at €17.8million after tax (2024-25: €16.9m), but it still means Barca have lost €348m in seven years, even with over €1bn in gains from the palancas they utilised in 2022 and 2023.

The overhang of those levers employed by the club in the early part of the decade continues.

Last season saw a further €23.3million written off the value of the club’s stake in Barca Studios, since rebranded as Barca Vision and then merged with Barca Produccions, a former Barca subsidiary. In fact, without that write-off, and even without the €9.5m in PSL income, Barca would’ve broken even last season.

That merger reduced the club’s holding in Barca Produccions and turned it into a subsidiary, though the year just past saw more share machinations. Barcelona’s stake in Produccions increased 9.72 per cent to 63.14 per cent overall, though no funds came Barca’s way; the share transaction was agreed as partial remission for previous credit losses incurred.

If that sounds messy and complicated, because it is, the upshot is that of the €401.1million in gains Barcelona recognised in relation to Barca Vision three years ago, €309.4m has now been written off the value. Those gains, of course, allowed the club to partially circumnavigate La Liga’s spending controls so, even as the club lops off chunks of value from the asset each year, the Byzantine structure of it all has certainly served a purpose.

Breaking even without the exceptional write-off and PSL income sounds pretty good in a sport where just about everyone loses money, but it’s less so in the context of €1.02billion revenues.

The costs of running Barcelona are enormous and, though transfer spending had been depleted until this summer, they’ve continued to spend heavily on their playing squad. Even with a squad laden with graduates from their La Masia youth academy, Barca’s wage bill is routinely one of football’s highest, reflecting how much the club must pay in order to retain its talent.

Wages lurched to €573.7million last season, a €63.7m (12 per cent) increase and second only to the club’s all-time high of €626m in 2022-23, a year when a raft of payments deferred during the Covid-19 pandemic were made. On Thursday, La Liga put Barca’s latest salary limit at €582.7m.

We don’t yet know everyone else’s wage bill for 2025-26, but Barca’s €574million would have been the highest of anyone in Europe had they recorded it in 2024-25, and is in the top five of all time based on publicly disclosed wage bills.There is the caveat of €45m being spent across other sporting teams, but Barca’s wage bill is plainly still huge.

What’s more, last season’s 12 per cent increase was almost entirely attributable to the men’s football team. Barca also employ a women’s team and various other sportspersons, alongside an administrative staff number which raced past 1,000 for the first time, yet all but €2.4million of the €63.7m increase was attributable to the club’s main attraction. Some €421.6m went on the wages of male first-team and youth footballers, or more than six times the average total wage bill at other La Liga clubs outside the big three of Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid.

Barca’s wages-to-revenue proportion is still healthy at 56 per cent, but has jumped 4.5 percentage points in a year, as cost growth outstrips revenue increases. The inverse was true in the quadruple-winning Barca Femini, where a historically good season for the women’s team saw revenues hit new heights (€28.9million) and wages to revenue fall to 53 per cent.

Running a club of Barca’s size costs a lot of money generally, and other running costs now top €350million annually, even without the impact of transfer fees being amortised across player contracts. Barca’s operating costs only trailed Madrid’s in 2024-25 (albeit by quite some distance), and it would be a surprise if the same wasn’t true of last season. The Spanish giants earn huge sums, but it costs a lot of money to generate them.

The paradox of Barcelona’s financial troubles is that they began with the biggest sale in football history, when Neymar departed in 2017 for a €222million fee that has never been topped.

That set in motion an era of egregious spending in Catalonia, and one of the less shouted-about aspects of Laporta’s second reign has been the significant reduction in transfer spending he has overseen.

Many will remember the summer of 2022, when those TV rights sales to Sixth Street helped Barca spend big on Raphinha, Jules Kounde and Robert Lewandowski.

Yet the €133.6million net transfer spend of that season was very much the exception rather than the norm; in the other four years of Laporta II, up to the end of June 2026, Barca’s net spend was just €58m. In fact, without the signing of Anthony Gordon in May, which fell into the 2025-26 figures, Barca’s net transfer spend across 2021-22 and 2023-26 would have been negative.

During the presidential election earlier this year, Laporta promised the club would be in a position to make new additions to the squad, and so it has proven.

The signing of Gordon for an initial €69m (in a deal worth up to €80m with add-ons) led the way, but he has been joined by Rodri (an initial €60m), Karim Adeyemi (€22m), Gabriel Jesus (€10m) and Jesse Bisiwu (€8.5m). Barca saved money on Joao Cancelo after he and Al Hilal cancelled his contract, but he’ll hardly be paid buttons.

Barca have made sales this summer too, most notably getting around €50million out of Paris Saint-Germain for Ferran Torres, but that was still less than they paid for him four seasons ago. They have generally been poor sellers in an age where more and more clubs have turned to the transfer market as a key source of income. Barca’s five-year profit on player sales prior to last season was just €81.4m, ninth among La Liga clubs and over €200m behind Real Madrid. 2025-26’s €38.7m was better than four of the past five seasons, but still lowly in an age of transfer-fee hyper-inflation.

Even with Gordon signed up, Barca’s squad cost — i.e. the amount spent to assemble the players on the books, inclusive of agent fees, at the end of June 2026 — was just €474.2million, a long way south of the €1billion-plus squads assembled at Real Madrid and no fewer than five different English clubs: Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool. Tottenham Hotspur’s summer largesse has likely moved them into that grouping too.

Despite much lower transfer spending than at other clubs, Barca have employed some surprising measures to meet their commitments.

Gordon has made an impressive start at Barca, quickly becoming a fan favourite (David Ramos/Getty Images)

In the case of Gordon, Barcelona were due to pay Newcastle United €22.3million on July 31 of this year, the first instalment on that initial €69m. According to these latest accounts, Barca deferred that payment by a year. However, Newcastle were still paid what was due to them (likewise Everton, who received sell-on and solidarity payments), as the first instalment was funded through Barca taking out a bank loan. In other words: they financed the first Gordon instalment with debt, naturally increasing the cost of the transfer, as the lender charges interest.

Barca’s net transfer debt of €82.3million had barely budged from a year earlier and, while that’s not an especially large figure when set alongside others in Europe’s elite, there are other signs of player payments being delayed.

At the end of last season, Barca owed RB Leipzig €33.7million on the August 2024 signing of Dani Olmo, €18.9m of it due before the end of June 2026. Yet by that latter date the amounts owed on Olmo had actually gone up slightly, to €34.4m. All of those amounts are now due within the 12 months to June 2027, but it is odd the balance did not reduce at all last season.

Similarly, Barca’s 2024-25 accounts showed them as owing €11.3million on Robert Lewandowski, €10.7m to Bayern Munich and the rest to his other former clubs in solidarities, all of it to be paid in 2025-26. Yet at the end of the latter, the balance still owed to Bayern was up to €11.1m (presumably because some add-ons crystallised last season).

Some €69million of transfer payments were made in 2025-26, including a €22.9million instalment to Leeds United for Raphinha (outstanding balance at end of June 2026: €19m), but even as Barca have spent less on transfers in recent years, they have taken actions to massage their cash flow. The taking on of extra debt to fund the Gordon payment is a clear sign of a club in need of liquidity.

When asked by The Athletic about that, and the other apparent deferrals of transfer payments, Barcelona did not confirm outright but did refer to recent actions as “routine cash flow management, aligning the timing of receipts and payments, as any business does”.

Barca cited “cash flow pressures” spurred by the ongoing delays to Camp Nou works, with a timing gap created between anticipated income (from the completed stadium) and the club’s payment liabilities.

Debt is hardly a foreign word for Barcelona these days.

If transfer debt is low relative to some footballing peers, the club’s financial debt is anything but. Last autumn, The Athletic reported Barcelona held the highest debt in world football. A year on, that remains true: more so. Barca’s debt, mostly attributable to the Espai Barca project, had moved up to €1.840billion by the end of June 2026.

That won’t be its high mark, either. These latest accounts detail club management’s acknowledgement that a further €300million in borrowings will be required to finish the works, having already upsized the allowed borrowing to €1.5bn in 2021. The new budget of €1.8bn, if signed off, will be three times that proposed when the project was first approved 12 years ago.

The €1.840billion debt covers non-Espai Barca borrowings too, and is already out of date. Since the end of June, Barca have issued a further €105m debt in the form of 10-year ‘senior’ notes (debt which takes priority over other liabilities), edging them ever closer to a €2bn debt mark they’ll surpass in 2026-27 anyway. The new debt incurs 5.14 per cent in fixed-rate interest, a higher coupon than previous senior notes issued by the club.

Barcelona received a net €51million cash in non-Espai Barca borrowings in 2025-26, and debt separate to the project sat at almost €600m at the end of June. What the new €105m has been used for is not stated, though its use on transfers would tally with The Athletic’s understanding of how the first Gordon instalment was met. Recent reporting in Spain also claims the club has now paid off the €84million it still owed on Olmo, Raphinha, Kounde, Lewandowski and Vitor Roque.

Again, when asked by The Athletic whether the newly issued senior notes had been used to pay down transfer liabilities, Barcelona declined to confirm or deny, only citing the cash flow pressures imposed by the construction delays that they’ve acknowledged publicly in the past.

Barca’s huge debt takes two distinct forms, with over €1.2billion of it related to Espai Barca, a long-term project that should, all going to plan, pay itself back many times over in the future. The remaining borrowings are much less strategic and, in effect, are a hangover of the awful financial position the club found itself in a few years ago.

A big issue with the Espai project continually running long is not just related to revenues. Interest payments have started to bite too. Last season, Barca’s cash out of the door on interest rocketed beyond €90million, an eye-watering sum and one which will recur given continued heavy borrowing.

Barca will doubtless seek to refinance regularly, as rates in Spain have declined from when some of their debt was issued. In July of this year, they refinanced €84million worth of the Espai debt at lower rates, though that’s obviously only a small tranche of the overall debt stack. And, as we’ve covered, the non-Espai debt they’ve taken out this summer has arrived at higher rates.

Refinancing the project will be necessary not just to try and get interest costs down but also because Barca will otherwise be staring at some huge imminent repayments they have no feasible way of meeting. Some €149million of their debt is due to mature in 2026-27, but that pales in comparison to future commitments: €345m matures in 2027-28 and €366m in 2029-30. A further €265m of those senior notes mature in 2031-32.

The club, Laporta and fans, will all hope Espai Barca is substantially complete by then, which would help financing negotiations, but it will still leave Barcelona with extremely large payments to meet. The Espai debt, while backed by the Camp Nou’s future income and therefore distinct from other debt on the club’s books, has been taken out at a couple of percentage points higher than Real Madrid’s debt for their own stadium remodelling, a sign of lenders’ (lack of) comfort around Barca’s finances.

In that context, the extra lending since the end of June and the peculiarities of that Gordon transfer instalment make plenty of sense, as the club continues to lose cash each season, even as underlying profitability measures are much improved.

Barcelona’s free cash flow — cash generated after covering operating costs and capital spending — has jumped around, in large part because of those levers. Even some things that didn’t fall into that categorisation have caused weird blips; in 2024-25, Barca’s free cash generated outside of the Espai project costs was hugely positive, but only because that renewed deal with Nike saw the kit manufacturer pay Barca a huge up-front sum.

Last season, free cash flow was €446million in the red, but included €350m spent on infrastructure and those €91m in net interest payments. In other words, after excluding Espai-related costs, Barcelona still used up more cash than they generated, albeit only just.The commencement of large payments before the works are completed has created the timing gap referred to above, squeezing liquidity in the immediate term.

Barca’s debt figure is often exaggerated in some circles, with the club’s total liabilities lumped together in a manner not seen elsewhere. Yet it would also be remiss to downplay the size of the club’s ongoing payables.

Across day-to-day commitments, financial and transfer debts, payments due to players and tax authorities and plenty more besides, the club’s liabilities due to be paid in 2026-27 total €905million, unmoved from a year ago. Meanwhile, the club’s short-term assets total just €529m, making for negative working capital of €376m, a €110m worsening on a year earlier.

Barcelona are still extraordinary — and remain a reminder that there are no quick fixes. Even with transfer spending having largely been tamped down under Laporta, running costs remain massive and they continue to pay some of the highest wages in football.

Debt is skyrocketing. In itself, that needn’t be a problem; the Espai Barca project is one of obvious worth which should return plenty, once it is finally complete. Investing in infrastructure to boost revenue streams is wise, particularly at a club with no shareholders to act as benefactors. Just like at Real Madrid, part of Barcelona’s issue is having to compete with foreign clubs that act as money pits for rich owners. But big maturity dates loom and refinancing to date has more often conferred higher, not lower, interest rates, a byproduct of them embarking on the project at a time of severe financial strife.

It is that desire to continue competing that ensures Barca’s financial revival will be far from swift.

Under Laporta, the club might have scaled everything back, refusing to keep pace with football’s rampant wage inflation, selling young stars for a fortune and reducing their edge on the field in the process. And when we say they might have done that, of course, they couldn’t. A Barcelona not fighting at the top end of football would not work, would not have voted Laporta back in and, in truth, would probably have struggled to secure more favourable financing: what use is a 105,000-seater stadium without a team worth watching?

Barca have certainly remained that, and though jaw-dropping financial losses have been dispensed with, they remain far from a picture of health. They desperately need their mega-project finishing sooner rather than later, and this summer’s relative splurge on players bears uncomfortable hallmarks; a president keeping fans onside by taking on further financial risk.

Going deeper in the Champions League this season would help and, when you see what Barca are budgeting for in 2026-27, should really be a given. The club’s wage bill is projected to land at €648.9million this season, a new record in Catalonia and another €75m on top of last year’s bill. Some €57m of the increase is concentrated in the men’s football team. If their budget proves accurate, the club’s wage bill will hit a mark only previously reached by Paris Saint-Germain, at least among European clubs.

All that while trying to get Espai Barca done and unlocking those purported €250million in additional revenues.

Most crucial to Barcelona’s long-term outlook is their success in refinancing the huge sums already borrowed to fund the project. Currently, even with the Espai commitments and accompanying interest stripped out, the club is not generating cash, save for when they sell off a future asset or receive a lump sum up front from a sponsor. Costs to compete are vast and, rather than reducing, are projected to go up.

So are revenues, with the €1.1billion mark expected to be topped in 2026-27. That will help, but those interest payments are now draining close to €100m a year from club coffers and potentially headed further north. Meeting them with greater comfort, and shifting the debt onto more favourable terms, will become a key focus of Laporta’s new term. A first Champions League trophy in over a decade wouldn’t be sniffed at either.

Barcelona will be worth watching. As always.