Barcelona, spending and loyalty: another view of football money

Managing Barcelona, a cynic might say, is little more than watching the team’s matches from the best seat in the stadium and collecting a huge sum every week. That, at least, is how the job of Barcelona’s recent managers can look. It is easy with an unlimited transfer budget and a squad containing figures such as Lionel Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez.

In that view, the manager only has to hope that nobody gets injured while the victories keep coming. The real work at the club is done by the youth coaches, who teach the youngsters how to pass perfectly, how to control the ball, how to move on the pitch and so on.

Which raises the question: why are the managers of the richest clubs paid so much? Messi could probably pick the starting line-up himself, and the club would save one enormous salary.

The obvious reply is that the manager is the decision-maker. But do the best players in the world, experienced men who have already won everything in football, really need someone to tell them what to do? It would be like Mozart telling Beethoven what to compose.

Football as a whole is an inflated balloon. It makes little sense for players and managers to earn more than doctors, for example. What do footballers actually do? They kick a ball and run after it. And how can Ibrahimovic’s reported wish for €600K a week be explained? Is that normal? Why are professional players so greedy?

Many professional footballers treat their clubs as nothing more than the next stop on the way to a bigger contract. A player who has already earned millions hardly needs another €20K a week, yet the logic of “the bigger, the better” always seems to win.

That is why there are so few players like Francesco Totti, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Steven Gerrard. The difference between Totti and the new generation of footballers comes down to one word: loyalty.

Then there was Barcelona’s bonus problem. How could it happen that a club risked financial trouble if the team won everything? It is the clearest example of the “inflated balloon”. Barcelona’s worries eased after they lost several games in a row, which led cynics to suggest the defeats were not entirely accidental.

The real cause of the situation, though, lies with the wealthy club owners who artificially inflate transfer fees and player wages. Regulation is needed not only for transfer fees but also for salaries. It cannot be normal for a footballer to earn in a week what an ordinary person earns in a lifetime, even if he is the best player in the world. As for the managers of the richest clubs, the owners might try an experiment and hand the job to a random person who knows enough about football.

How UEFA tried to regulate spending

The call for regulation was not an isolated one. UEFA’s Financial Control Panel agreed its Financial Fair Play rules in September 2009, and they took effect from the 2011-12 season. The aim was to stop clubs spending more than they earned over several seasons. Transfers, wages and finance costs counted against the break-even test, while income from gate receipts, television and sponsorship offset them; spending on stadiums, training facilities and youth development was left out. Clubs were allowed to overspend by up to €5 million per three-year assessment period, or by more if the owner covered the excess directly. Breaches could be punished with sanctions ranging from a reprimand and fines to points deductions and exclusion from UEFA competitions.

The loyal ones in numbers

Francesco Totti made his Roma debut on 28 March 1993, aged 16, and played his last match for the club on 28 May 2017, coming on as a substitute against Genoa. He scored 250 Serie A goals, the most by any player for a single club, and became captain at 22. Ryan Giggs spent his whole career at Manchester United from 1990 to 2014, making 963 competitive appearances, a club record, and winning 13 Premier League titles.