Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger in all he does » Barca: how a once great club has collapsed under the demands of its fans
By Phil Gregory
Yesterday Untold Arsenal published the second in the series of Barca’s finances revealing how the club has lied over supposed profits, and how the prediction made previously that they were actually on the edge financially was completely true.
Having seen the story develop I wanted to know what happened in the build up to this fiasco. I figured what with them needing to borrow around £125m to pay wages despite being able to buy Villa and bid for Fabregas it’d be worth shedding some extra light on their finances.
So in this article I’m going to look at the 08-09 accounts as they are fully audited and I have data from the same year for other English sides for comparison, too.
Thankfully, Barcelona put an English translation of the accounts up, but the quality of it is poor. From a quick read through I’ve found spelling mistakes and sentences that halfway through revert back to Spanish! Not the most heinous of crimes, but does it really give an impression of professionalism and thoroughness off? Not at all. For a club that boasts that it reaches out to the world, using a proofreader on its official accounts wouldn’t seem too much to ask.
According to their accounts, their turnover for 08-09 stood at £286m, lower than I would’ve expected but still higher than Arsenal’s £225m. I’m converting figures to pounds so that you can compare easily to what I’ve written on the various other clubs previously, though exchange rates changes will have an effect on the figures.
Their wage bill stands at £168m, or £8m more than Chelsea (the highest in the Premier League). That puts wages as a percentage of turnover at 58.7%, not an unreasonable level though much higher than the top clubs in the Premier League bar Chelsea (46.2% for Arsenal, 44.2% for United and 53.5% for Spurs). As we saw in yesterday’s article it is now 64% and rising.
That in itself is not a disaster, in terms of current finance, but it raises a huge problem. Once a club gets up to that level it is very hard to come down again, without falling down the league table. At the moment quality players on the move expect Barca to pay big. If they don’t they go elsewhere, which forces Barca to pay more. The spiral can rarely be broken.
Bear in mind that this is all while Barcelona and Real Madrid have the vast majority of La Liga’s TV revenues (£112m from TV for Barcelona, compared to £73m for Arsenal). The EPLs television deal is worth substantially more than La Liga’s but the top Spanish club’s get the lion’s share of their league deal, so their top clubs get more than our top clubs courtesy of individual sale of the rights.
If they were ever to shift to collective bargaining and share the money out in a similar fashion to the EPL, my rough estimation is that they’d be looking at TV revenues falling by at least half. With the finances and competitive balance in La Liga in a dire state, a shift to collective bargaining is inevitable in my opinion.
One thing that is generally impossible to get from a football club’s accounts is details of their actual transfer spending. Even in the new Financial Fair Play criteria (article on that on its way), the only way transfers are taken into account is via amortisation. We can however get a number for transfer spending by taking a look at the cash flow statement (literally, the record of money coming in and out) and there they give us a very useful number. I hadn’t noticed it until it got pointed out to me by Andersred (a virulent anti-Glazer Man U site which is well worth reading by anyone who is able to have a civilised conversation with a supporter of a rival team).
It is basically the total amortisation charge to be paid for players bought in that window, which is of course the total transfer fee paid for players in that window, and thus very useful. According to this figure, Barcelona spent over £61m during the 08-09 financial year while Hleb alone cost them £13.5m in case you were wondering.
For a club who play up the fact they have Unicef on the front of their shirt, they seem to do more than well enough out of having the Nike logo on their jersey, earning them a minimum of EUR30m (£25m). Doing the maths, they made £36.7m from taking part in competitions and tours, while membership money chipped in a further £15m, season-ticket holders £27.5m. Commercial revenues of £93.4m dwarf Arsenal’s of £48m, and even the marketing machine of Manchester United doesn’t come close at £70m.
Amortisation (transfer fee paid for a player divided by the length of the players contract) is bundled with depreciation though the latter figures isn’t a substantial figure, so the figure of £52.5m is sky-high (over twice that of Arsenal, nearly half again that of United and a shade below that of Chelsea).
Not bad considering the 08-09 operating profit was only £18.6million, and such high transfer spending is the reason they’ve got a lower pre-tax profit £7.3m. Finance charges of £12.5m will also have played their part (a bit lower than Arsenal’s £16m but then we have a vastly larger debt because of the stadium development).
On the topic of debt, be wary of any figures quoted in the sports media, as most of the journalists don’t have much of a clue about finance, or life in general for that matter. They tend to pick the biggest, headline grabbing figure which includes all sorts such as outstanding fees to be paid for players as a result of long-term payment agreements. Clearly, we can’t compare such a figure to the circa £200m that is Arsenal’s debt, as the latter figure doesn’t include what Arsenal owe to other sides, so it’s an unfair comparison.
On the topic of these liabilities, they owe £18m, during 10-11, as well as £15m in 11-12 to other football clubs. This is actually fairly low, which points to many of their recent transfers being done on a cash up-front basis. Given Inter’s spending the summer that they sold Ibrahimovic, it wouldn’t be unrealistic that they demanded the majority of the money up-front, while they apparently paid for Villa in a lump payment due to Valencia’s financial problems.
They’ve also got a EUR29m loan listed on the accounts to be paid back to La Caixa on the 18th Feb 2010 (which was probably the tipping point of the current round of disasters, and the not paying of players in June this year) of which EUR15m has already been paid back apparently. Part of the reason for this loan was to cover the deficit of non-payment of the TV money by Audiovisual Sport, who apparently have been told to pay up by the courts, so that should in theory pay off the debt.
This loan does make one thing very clear: Barcelona are dependent on TV revenue. As soon as the TV money didn’t come through, they had to rush to the bank, hardly the most sustainable and resilient of business models. After such an event, if I were running them I’d be looking to cut my costs or keep more cash in the bank to somewhat mitigate any future issues with the TV companies, but can you really see Barcelona applying some restraint to wages?
I also stumbled across something they called a “syndicated finance contract” which is basically a line of credit that totalled EUR150 in two phases. Phase one consisted of EUR92.5m, all of which was used and then paid back in 2008. Phase two “consists of a line of deposits to warrant guarantees of maximum EUR113.9m”. Most interestingly, the club have failed to stay within financial parameters set out in the contract which should serve as a warning shot to lenders. However and most confusing of all, apparently there are no consequences as a result of them not meeting the parameters. That’s Spanish banks for you. I didn’t dig too deeply into this syndicated finance contract as I don’t feel qualified to do so adequately, but this is effectively Barcelona supplementing their transfer spending with credit, hardly a sustainable business plan and one that will hopefully come back to haunt them if Spanish banks start to get cold feet.
The section in which they spoke of the risks facing their business also made for some interesting reading. My personal favourite has to be “the Club, for purposes of ensuring liquidity [literally, having sufficient cash in hand] and enabling it to meet all the payment obligations arising from its business activities has the cash and cash equivalents disclosed in its balance sheet…” Well, they clearly didn’t have enough to cover the current summer’s wages given the £125m bank loan they needed, did they!
What is most confusing is how they managed to put sufficient cash aside for wages in the summer of 2009, with all the bonus payments of that highly successful season, and yet in the slightly less successful 2010, they didn’t have enough money. My educated guess is that the money that was paid to Valencia for Villa was originally put aside to cover summer wages, though it was a lot less than the £115m that they eventually borrowed, and surely Barcelona wouldn’t be that negligent?
The fact however that their future liabilities to other football clubs (literally, what they owe on transfer spending still) is relatively low despite their high transfer spending suggests to me that they’ve been paying for a recent purchases up-front. If they did so, it would back up my theory about why they didn’t have money budgeted for wages.
They probably have been paying up-front or nearly up-front for players in order to persuade clubs in financial trouble to let a player go. When Chelsea got the Abramovich money they did exactly the same, which is why clubs flocked to their door to flog off the goods. It was only a little later that these same clubs realised how much damage they were doing to themselves by letting such top players go in this way, and it may be that in Spain the same is happening.
Either way, it is shockingly bad planning, especially when they apparently take steps to avoid any such cash flow issues.
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The Barca and Cesc story: revealed
Cesc signs five year deal in Barca
Who is lying and why: the Cesc interview with translation
How Barca lied over supposed profits,
Barca on the edge financially – the first crack in the facade.
Other finances
Analysis of Arsenal’s finances, and those of other top English clubs.
The story of our administration, and the rise from the tomb.