Rarely can a trademark have fitted so well, even if it wasn’t exactly the way Dani Olmo intended it. Not long ago the Barcelona midfielder lodged his own brand with the EU; it includes the goalscoring celebration, borrowed from the Milwaukee Bucks basketball player Damian Lillard, in which he stands pointing at his wrist, asking what time it is.
Over the past few days, the image has been everywhere and everyone has been asking the same question, staring at their watches, waiting as the seconds tick by. The answer of course is: Olmo Time. Or it was supposed to be.
Instead, time has run out on him. Signed from RB Leipzig on a deal worth almost €60m, Olmo has five months later been removed from the squad after the 31 December deadline passed without Barcelona meeting the league’s salary limit rules. By the following morning Olmo and the forward Pau Víctor – who was entitled to spend New Year’s Day hopping about shouting: “Hello?! I’m here too!” – had disappeared from La Liga’s website. Neither will be able to play for Barcelona again this season. They will have to wait until the summer to be registered – if the club can meet the financial fair play rules then.
A clause in Olmo’s contract means he can now walk away for free, the €48m Barcelona paid in an initial fee having bought them 15 games, although his agent insists he will not. He cannot be loaned – for Barcelona to do so, they would have to be in possession of his registration – and he cannot be re-signed as a free agent. He also can’t play for Spain. “Barcelona is his first and last option,” the agent, Andy Bara, said; he also said: “Dani loves playing games, not watching them.”
Barcelona continue to look for a solution, a way of rescuing this, and although the club denied they had asked for or been given a three-day moratorium, few have taken the deadline as definitive. There has been silence from Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga and a man you normally can’t shut up. The Barcelona president, Joan Laporta, has not spoken publicly either but he is optimistic, they say; thing is, Laporta is always optimistic. “We don’t have to suffer over Pau Víctor and Dani Olmo; we’re working on it and will get there as we always have,” he said in September, and look where that ended up. If, that is, this has ended.
When Laporta took power he inherited a club in technical bankruptcy. Having stood on a simple promise – to keep Lionel Messi – the first thing he did was preside of the departure of the best player in the club’s history. Keen to reduce the salary mass but equally determined to keep signing, he came up with what he described as palancas, or levers: the sale of assets and future income from TV rights to ticketing and of 49% of the club’s media arm.
Issues were kicked down the road, problems left for another day, promises made. They walked a tightrope, for ever on edge. Deals were done, often last minute and after the season had begun. Robert Lewandowski, Jules Koundé, Ferran Torres and Vitor Roque cost nearly €200m. Palancas paid for Lewandowski. Gerard Piqué took a pay cut so the club could sign Memphis Depay and Eric García. A legal challenge led to Gavi’s inclusion. Bank guarantees got Koundé through. A league rule allowing 80% of an injured player’s wage to be assigned to an alternative, salaries moved around the spreadsheet, allowed them to register Vitor Roque and Iñigo Martínez. One way or another, they got there. With Olmo, they haven’t, so far.
On Friday lunchtime Hansi Flick did his usual pre-match press conference, before Barcelona’s Copa del Rey game against Barbastro, at about the time the president was turning up at the training ground. Olmo and Víctor were ready to play, Flick said, if they can play, which was a big if, startling that the possibility was even contemplated. “Honestly, I don’t like this situation,” the coach said. Olmo’s agent, meanwhile, called it “stressful” but said his client was trying to stay calm; he could not call it surprising.
There is a reason the clause was written into his contract: because his lawyers wanted to protect him from precisely this scenario.
When Olmo signed with a contract that costs the club €21m a year in accounting terms, Barcelona were about €60m over their €426m salary limit. Forced to sit out the first two weeks of the season, Olmo was eventually registered in week three thanks to Andreas Christensen’s achilles problem, but only until 31 December. It was a method used before and a better option than rushing a deal with Nike, according to Laporta. “We’re not at 1:1 [a balanced budget] because we don’t want to be,” he said in September.
There was plenty of time, after all; a short-term solution would do for now. When that agreement was signed off, Laporta described it as the biggest kit deal in football history but La Liga informed Barcelona they had still not reached their targets. In fact, the gap between the operating cost and the salary limit established by the league had widened. They had five months to fix it; now they were into the final weeks. Barcelona reassured Olmo’s camp that this would be resolved by the deadline, but time was running out.
They launched two lawsuits that challenged the authority of the league’s delegate commission to set the rules on salary limits, claimed that refusing to register Olmo and Víctor was an infringement of their workers’ rights and argued that 80% of the injured Marc-André ter Stegen’s salary could be earmarked for Olmo, even though they had already used that to sign Wojciech Szczesny as an emergency replacement. They did not only lose both cases; the judges were dismissive of their arguments, rejected as little more than a transparent attempt to chance their arm, to buy some time and get the league’s decision put on hold.
There was one more option. Eventually Barcelona claimed to have closed the sale of VIP boxes in the new, still unfinished Camp Nou to unnamed investors from the Middle East for an announced amount briefed to be between €100m and €120m; half of the initial valuation but this was an emergency. La Liga, though, said that seeing a draft contract was not enough; it needed proof of payment, guarantees that the deal was real. It had been here before, after all: the palanca for the sale of the Barcelona Vision content platform was never paid, suspicions raised about the true nature of the agreement.
That proof didn’t come in, although Barcelona are still briefing that it is on the way and that they would be prepared to go to court again to get it through, even beyond deadline. And so, with three hours left on New Year’s Eve, and everyone staring at their watches, Barcelona announced they had asked the Spanish federation – not the league – to provide Olmo and Víctor with a new registration, not an extension of the existing one, even though a player cannot be registered to the same club twice in the same season.
That request was met with silence from the governing body, upon which, in any case, the decision does not depend, and an hour after that, La Liga announced that Barcelona had done “nothing … to allow them to register any player from 2 January”.
This time, Olmo Time didn’t come.
