A closer look into the numbers of the salary cap regulations
The start of the La Liga 2023/24 season is just 2 days away and FC Barcelona is the only team with only 12 players registered – an impossible challenge to defend the La Liga crown again with such a squad. So who is already registered and who not? Why are players like Lenglet and Dest so deadly for Barca’s salary cap and how much money is really missing in order to register the full squad ahead of the Liga opener against Getafe?
Desperate situation
The salary cap or Squad Cost Limit, Barca has to deal with this season is expected to be at around 400-450 million EUR. This means FC Barcelona’s wage bill should not exceed this amount. In other words the club is not allowed to spend more money than those 400-450 million EUR. Considering the fact that last year’s salary cap was 200 million EUR higher, mainly because of the financial levers, the situation seems quite hopeless – or is it?
Salary cap analysis of FC Barcelona
Right below you can see by how much each Barcelona player would exploit the cap, should he get registered and which players are already registered and which not. These amounts consist not only of the salary of the player, but also many other cost items, such as player amortisation, variables, agent fees, image right payments and so on.
As you can see players like Lenglet and Dest, who are obviously not in Xavi´s plans for the upcoming season, account for approximately 35 million euros together – clearly unproductive money.
Furthermore, Barcelona hasn’t managed to register key players like Araujo and Baldé or the new signings like Ilkay Gündogan, Oriol Romeu or Inigo Martinez. And if that’s not bad enough, Ilkay Gündogan has a clause in his contract, that allows him to become a free agent, if Barca does not manage to register him in time.
How much money does Barcelona need?
But how much money does Barca really need to cut, or on the other hand has to raise, in order to avoid such a dilemma.
If we add up all these amounts from above, we would get a total of around 420 million EUR. So nothing to worry about, when the Salary cap is projected to be at around 450 million EUR – not quite.
These 420 million euros would only be spent on the men’s first team. However, La Liga´s player registration rules state, that the salary cap is not only for the football team, but also for every other sports team of the club, if there are any. As you might know, following the recent success of Barcelona’s women football team, there is not only the men’s football squad that needs to be taken into account, in fact FC Barcelona is also in charge of a basketball, handball, futsal and even a roller hockey team.
All Barcelona teams except the men’s first-team take up another 91 million euros, which results in a whole spending of around 510 million euros.
Prospect
The board of FC Barcelona seems very calm, as well as Frenkie de Jong, one of Barca’s new captains, as he stated in an interview; no player is worried about his registration, furthermore it isn’t even a topic in the dressing room.
Following the media there are optimistic approaches to sign a last economic lever in the final stages of the transfer window, that would solve all of the mentioned problems. In addition to that, the basketball department is willing to take significant cuts to their chunk of the budget and the departure of Lenglet and Dest doesn’t seem quite unlikely.