Thus, with the League about to start and an obvious urgency, Barça accelerated the sale of Barça Studios first to Socios.com and then to a Jaume Roures estate. A 24.5% per company (49% between the two) in exchange for a total of 200 million restored a normality which, however, was not enough to register Kounde, finally regularized thanks to a personal guarantee from Laporta. The dual operation was sold with fanfare through official channels: “It will serve to accelerate the growth of the digital, NFT and web.3 strategy.” Months later, the club detailed at the members’ assembly the schedule to reach 200 million: 20 at the time of signing, 60 in 2023, 60 in 2024 and 60 in 2025.
But the reality was not so pretty. Socios.com and Roures, who only signed a right to buy, only paid the initial 20 million. For this reason, Barça had to look for new investors who would find sense in entering a business that was not developed internally and was not stable in its external assessment. One of the solutions was to name it Barça Vision and put it under a more ambitious umbrella, Barça Media, which was to reach a valuation of 1,000 million if expectations were met on the Nasdaq. “It is the mother of all levers”, defined, forcefully, the economist Xavier Sala i Martín, friend of Laporta and former Barça vice-president between 2008 and 2010. But the stock market plan failed when Libero Football Finance, the investor who promised to meet the payment schedule, never paid all the money agreed upon.
The 40 million owed have dragged on since last summer and have finished turning Barça Vision into a perverse boomerang. In 2022, the lever allowed Barça to recover the 1:1 rule of the fair play of the League, but now it is the main reason that the institution, again outside the 1:1 rule, needs outrageous solutions to register signings even if it is trying to reduce the wage bill. And the worst part is that there are no measures on the horizon to fix the gibberish beyond the financial urgency. This is how they see it in the financial offices of the club, where there is resignation due to the lack of tangibility of the business. “Right now, Barça Vision is just expectations and it’s very difficult to convince anyone,” Aristides Maillol said a few months ago. In this context, the anomalous auction that took place for the NFT of Alexia Putellas or the recent voluntary departure of Albert Bagó, Barça’s director of strategy, are framed.
Aramark only covers part of the hole
Since there is no consistent business plan for Barça Vision, the only solution that Laporta has found to suture the strip is to sell a part of the pie to Aramark, the company that will exploit the catering of the new Camp Nou in the next twenty five years Juicy bonus for the North American multinational, which has paid Libero’s needs 40 million in two concepts. On the one hand, 15 million corresponding to sandwiches and canapés that he has not yet prepared and, on the other, 25 million for Barça Vision. Now, in relation to this second amount, Laporta recognized a few days ago that the League had only calculated 15 because the remaining 10 were to be returned to another business partner. Consulted by the ARA, Roures maintains that this figure has “nothing to do” with him, while Socios.com neither confirms nor denies that the money has compensated the 10 million he disbursed in the summer of 2022. Silence and darkness .
Be that as it may, the puzzle is huge and, as pointed out before, there is nothing to think about the emergence of strategic partners that give real value to the activity of Barça Vision. On the contrary: there is a need to continue plugging the black hole with solutions that are more fatty than fibrous. It is no coincidence, in this sense, that there is talk of a premium of 120 million euros for Nike to renew until 2038 the contract it has with the Catalan club. It is the same amount that, in the eyes of the League, remains to be satisfied in the payment schedule of Barça Vision: the 60 million in 2024 and the 60 in 2025.
Accounting risk
On August 6, according to a statement published by Libero, this company sold 6.14% of Barça Vision in exchange for 25 million Aramark. The same statement said that Libero was then in negotiations to get rid of the remaining unpaid 15 million of the 40 that he had to face in 2023 (when Barça gives the numbers for the exercise it will have to be seen if this has an impact on the accounting valuation of the club’s audiovisual business) and that the agreement also ended the legal litigation that Barça had started against Libero due to non-payments.
From an accounting point of view, Barça Vision brought in 408 million euros at the end of the 2022-2023 financial year. The first 200 belong to the 49% of the business that the investors have bought and the remaining 208 are awarded to them by Barça in exchange for the 51% of Barça Vision that it owns in a maneuver called put into equivalence in financial jargon. But every non-payment by an investor risks that this valuation has to be reduced in the club’s accounts. Laporta’s board now finds itself having to reverse as best it can the 60 million that Libero will not pay this year because, if not, the accounting value of 49% of Barça Vision will become 140 million and, in addition, the club will have to supply a little more than 60 million of its 51%. In other words, it will put at risk a figure greater than 120 million accountants.
And there will still be the 60 million that Roures and Socios.com will not pay in 2025 and that pose the same accounting risk as this year’s defaults. In all this mess, there are two supervisors who must dictate the limits of how far Barça can go: Javier Tebas’ League and the club’s auditor, Grant Thornton. Precisely, the auditor is currently examining the numbers for the 2023-2024 financial year, which has not yet been closed. Sources from Aristides Maillol inform the ARA that there will be no last minute operation and that the forecast is to seal them with positive ordinary results.
