FC Barcelona have reportedly closed a last-minute €100m (£82.9m) deal to sell VIP boxes at the newly renovated Camp Nou to Middle Eastern investors. The club are hopeful the sale will allow them to meet financial fair play rules and finally extend Dani Olmo’s registration.
With the deadline for registration just three days away and Barcelona facing the prospect of Olmo leaving as a free agent just six months after joining on a €55m (£45.6m) transfer, the club president Joan Laporta exercised a sale option on Saturday which the club believe will see the first payment made before 31 December.
The deal comes in the wake of a court rejecting Barcelona’s lawsuit which sought to extend Olmo’s registration beyond the end of the year. Barcelona argued that not granting the extension would infringe upon the player’s worker rights, that the league’s economic commission did not have the jurisdiction to impose limitations.
But Ignacio Fernández de Senespleda, a presiding judge at the city’s commercial court who had accepted a similar request with midfielder Gavi in 2023, rejected their case. That left Barça facing a race against time to find a way to comply with La Liga’s FFP rules and avoid the grim prospect of seeing Olmo walk away from the club.
Having signed the Euro 2024 star from RB Leipzig, Barcelona were unable to register him until week three of the season, when they took advantage of Article 77 of league rules which allows clubs to temporarily use up to 80% of the salary due to an injured player on an alternative.
An achilles injury to Andreas Christensen provided sufficient margin to register Olmo, but only until the end of the calendar year. That gave Barcelona time to find solutions and reach what is commonly known as “1:1”, the point at which there is a balance between outgoings and income, and a club can spend a euro for every euro they earn.
A new, seven-year kit deal with Nike was thought to be the key and Barcelona also believed they would be able to apply the salary “freed” up by a serious knee injury suffered by Marc André ter Stegen to Olmo.
The league calculated that, although the signing bonus from Nike had been paid, Barça still had not reached their financial targets and judged that Ter Stegen’s injury had already been used to register Wojciech Szczesny, whom the club brought out of retirement to sign on an emergency deal. The judge agreed with that interpretation.
Unlike in 2023, La Liga’s lawyers had attended the court to present their case on 23 December after some clubs had questioned Barcelona’s approach. “La Liga has put in place rules of budgetary balance, using the authority given to it by the law,” the league said in a statement welcoming the decision which concluded that “none of the necessary conditions for the adoption of a temporary measure have been met.” It added that the rules had been “applied in the same way to all clubs.”
The ruling left Olmo and striker Pau Víctor at risk of being unavailable from 1 January. The Spain international has a clause in his contract that allows him to unilaterally depart should the club fail to register him. Barça made a further appeal which is due to be heard by a different court on 30 December, unless the VIP seating sale is closed.
Barcelona are in breach of the €426m salary limit set for the 2024-25 season, meaning that they have limitations imposed upon them when it comes to registering players. For accounting purposes, Olmo’s salary is just over €21m a year.
The aim of Article 77, the league’s statement said, “is to not [allow a serious injury to] damage a team’s ability to compete, not to register players whose salary means that they exceed the limit, which is what Barcelona are pretending.”
Olmo has played 15 times for Barça this season, scoring six goals. The 26-year-old has been seen in Milwaukee visiting basketball player Damian Lillard, with whom he shares a wrist-tapping celebration.
