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Laporta says Barca will have the option to buy back both the share in the TV rights and the share in Barcelona Licensing and Merchandising, but again, we don't know the terms. (And if the revenue stays around the €60m mark, sure, Barca will come out ahead vis-a-vis the upfront money they get, but they'll only be getting €30m from licensing, rather than €50m.)Īll of this points to the fact that this is very much a gamble. So if somebody pays them €250m and they do get to €100m in revenues, after just five years, whoever acquired the 49.9% will have made their money back.
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Laporta is confident that number can rise if they get the right strategic partner (they reportedly turned down an offer from Fanatics worth €200m, plus up to €75m in bonuses), pointing out that around 75% of that revenue comes from local shops and, of course, Barca fans exist all over the world.īut even if they boost licensing and merchandising revenues to €100m (and that means increasing them by nearly 70%, which isn't easy), they're giving half of it away to their new partner. The pandemic meant shutting the stores, no fans in the stadiums and closing the Barcelona Museum (which happens to be the second-most-visited in Spain, after the Prado in Madrid), so that €63m is the only reliable benchmark we have. In 2018-19, the last year pre-pandemic, they earned €63m. It's a similar story with the Barcelona Licensing and Merchandising, the subsidiary that sells and licenses Barca-branded goods. Barcelona president Joan Laporta is taking a gamble with the club's finances.
Unless you're a time traveller from the future, you don't know what the numbers will look like down the road, but if you can forecast things and are reasonably confident in your predictions, you can do a proper cost-benefit analysis. Barca still get a bigger share, provided they finish at or near the top of the table, but the competition's amounts will also increase proportionally. The issue, too, is that as LaLiga's rights deal increases in value (assuming it does), it won't just increase for Barca - it will increase for every other team too. Read all the latest news and reaction from ESPN FC senior writer Gabriele Marcotti. And that means they will probably give away more than €41m a year (probably much more) in that time period (they'll also, of course, be making more, because they get to keep the other 75%). On the flip side, LaLiga's domestic TV deal will presumably rise in value - and, with it, the amount that Barcelona receive - over the next decades. After all, inflation is a real thing - stuff cost a lot less money 25 years ago. But, of course, the argument is that sometimes it's better to have €500m now rather than €41m a year for the next 25 years. If they made that amount for the next 25 years and they sold 25% of their rights, they would end up giving away more than €1 billion. Laporta has said they are working on four separate deals and that they hope to wrap them up quickly in order to get out from under the spending cap limits.īarcelona earned around €165m from the LaLiga deal in 2020-21.
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By that metric, if they sell the full 25%, they could earn €500m. He has said that, for every 10% that is sold, Barca could rake in some €200m. Laporta is open to selling up to 25% of Barcelona's domestic league broadcast revenue for up to 25 years. But we can go through the architecture of each and better understand the risks involved. I can't tell you whether Barcelona got themselves a good deal. I'm not an expert on medium and long-term trend forecasting when it comes to the value of media rights and merchandising/licensing. And what's suboptimal in this case is the fact that the people making the decisions - Laporta and his board - likely won't be around to face the fallout if they get it wrong, whereas they will be there to reap the short-term benefits. It's not necessarily a bad move it could work out great. They are basically saying: "We're going to make so much money going forward, why don't you, dear investor, give us an advance on it now." The club have basically taken out a massive mortgage on their future, to a degree no other team has done in the past. This doesn't quite mean - as might be implied - that players have to pay to play for the club, but it's not far off and, as it stands, would mean that Barca would need to shed players and salaries in order to bring anybody in. Their spending maximum for next season is currently negative to the tune of -€144m. It's money Barcelona desperately needed, because as of right now, they're way over LaLiga's spending limits.