• Barça.The players assume the salary cut and accuse the leaders of putting pressure on them

There is a certain feeling at the end of the journey in Barcelona. That it's time to get carried away by the tide. Maybe even get drunk. Josep Maria Bartomeu has only one year left as president of the club, so he manages the fires with the sole objective of survival. It happened with the scandal of the fake accounts - whose audit is happily fallow due to the coronavirus crisis - and now with the turbulent negotiation with the footballers of the first team to cut their salaries. Measure by which all professional athletes will have their daily salary reduced by 70% (5.75% of the annual record for each month of confinement) from the start of the state of alarm, on March 14, until the return to training. With a difference. The soccer and basketball first team footballers will not go through an ERTE, unlike the rest of the athletes and club employees.

The players of the first soccer team were the last to assume the private agreement after the Palau sections abided by it last weekend. The footballers took the step this Monday through a statement in which they accused the leaders of having pressured them. And where they also assured that the team will make additional contributions (specifically 2% of their daily salary) to ensure that the rest of the non-professional employees affected by the measures receive 100% of their salary . The Barcelona Workers' Works Council publicly thanked him.

«Bartomeu has adopted a lukewarm position with the players, and will continue to be conciliatory with them; He will make a successful assessment of all this, "said sources in the directive shortly before the Barça president tried to come out unscathed through interventions in the newspapers Sport and Mundo Deportivo :" From the first moment I wanted [the cut] to be something agreed and not imposed, even if we could do it by law. It has been achieved as I wanted and not in an imposed way. There was a predisposition from the first day, from minute one, "said Bartomeu.

Part of its board of directors, on the other hand, is upset by how the president and CEOscar Grau , CEO of the entity, have negotiated the matter. But, above all, outraged at the attitude of the first team.

"Heroes? Footballers have given no more and no less than what the law would have required. It is as if they say they agree to pay Income Tax and we must thank them for being generous. They have not been. The only gesture they have made is to supplement the salary of the club's non-sports employees affected by the ordinary ERTE. And that will mean about 300,000 euros a month to divide. We expected much more from them. They do not realize that we have no balance to withstand this collapse. The economic impact on the club is going to be brutal, "proclaims a manager.

According to the calculations made by the Barcelona executives and revealed by Bartomeu, the club will save about 14 million euros in net salary for the first team each month, to which two million will be added, provided by the cuts in the other sections.

From the board of directors, in any case, they maintain that the conversations with the captains of the first soccer team, which had great weight in the videoconference talks by Sergio Busquets and Gerard Piqué , were of little use: «We expected them to go beyond that 70 % marked by law. That they would go the extra mile.

“We are not a club with a great tycoon behind. We are not listed on the Stock Market, nor can we make a capital increase. This crisis is going to be a wild slab. And we will have to ask all the money that we lack, from the banks ”, they assure from the top of a Barcelona open in the canal.

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  • Gerard Piqué
  • Sergio Busquets
  • sports
  • Coronavirus

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