Neymar during his presentation at the Parc on August 4, 2017. -
Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP
Barça welcomes PSG on Tuesday evening in the round of 16 first leg of the Champions League.
Since Neymar's departure from PSG in the summer of 2017, the club has greatly increased its debt to the point that it now reaches 900 million euros.
But do the troubles really date from the departure of the Brazilian in Paris?
This is the question we asked ourselves today.
It's a story that Parisian supporters love to tell their children on winter evenings by the fireside.
After the humiliation born of the comeback, PSG played a hell of a nasty trick on their Catalan executioner by blowing up Neymar's release clause in the summer of 2017, thus slowly but surely starting the
Blaugrana's
sporting and economic descent into hell
.
In fact, they are not far from the truth.
At least that's what the numbers say.
According to
La Vanguardia
, between 2017 and 2020, FC Barcelona widened its debt like drilling an oil well in the middle of the Iraqi desert.
From 247 million three years ago, it now reaches 1.173 billion euros (including 730 million to be repaid in the short term).
How do you say “aouch” in Catalan?
But is it really reasonable to blame this economic quagmire on the sole departure of the Brazilian for PSG and the poor management choices that followed?
This is the question that we decided to dig as the two new best enemies of Europe meet for the first time on Tuesday since this famous March 8, 2017.
222 million euros evaporated in five months
Let's get things straight from the start: far from us the idea of wanting to rewrite history and say that the transfer of the Brazilian to PSG in the summer of 2017 was just a small stone in the Blaugrana shoes .
Quite the contrary.
For the Spanish journalist Marcos Lopez, the sale of the Brazilian to PSG for a record sum of 222 million euros resulted in a "total panic" at the head of the club and marked, if not the beginning, at least say a certain acceleration of the galleys at Barça.
“The leaders absolutely did not see it coming.
For them it was inconceivable that Neymar was leaving and they found themselves completely disoriented when it finally happened ”, relates our colleague from
Periódico de Catalunya.
Naked in the middle of August after the flight from the Ney, the leaders then have only one idea in mind: to calm the anger or disappointment of the members of the company by buying quickly, very quickly, the one who in their eyes represents the future of world football at the moment T. And as at that time a certain Ousmane Dembélé broke the house on the side of Dortmund, that he is young, that he goes fast, the calculation is quickly done.
“They were so taken aback by the departure of Neymar that they began to play the playstation, judge the Spanish economist Marc Ciria i Roig, member of the candidacy of the former president Joan Laporta in 2015. C ' that is, you look at the top rated players of the moment and you throw yourself on them without there being any coherence or strategic sports plan.
"
“The decision was taken in haste.
Neymar leaves at the beginning of August and Dembélé arrives on the 27th, continues Marcos Lopez.
It has absolutely nothing to do with a carefully considered decision where you say to yourself "well, we must prepare the future, Messi will not be eternal, who do we take?".
No, there it was "wow, Neymar left, we must quickly do something!".
”Not content with having signed the French international for a record sum (105 million euros + 40 bonus), Josep Maria Bartomeu wanted more.
And six months later it's Coutinho who tumbles into Catalonia for 120 million (+ 40 bonus there too, as long as it is) from Liverpool.
Dembouz during his presentation at Camp Nou, August 27, 2017. - LLUIS GENE / AFP
“In two transfers and in barely five months, the mountain of money they had received from Neymar had disappeared in a snap, choked the Catalan journalist.
And as it did not work with these players [at least initially for Dembélé], they decide to make Griezmann, which costs you there again 135 million euros.
After the departure of Neymar, the club and his management made the three most expensive transfers in the club's history for the result that we know… ”
Add to that contract extensions do you want it, here it is, accompanied by juicy salary increases (Messi, of course, but also Gérard Piqué, Sergi Roberto, Jordi Alba, Samuel Umtiti) and a small global pandemic and you understand how Barça has come to such a situation of "economic strangulation", says Marcos Lopez.
“The truth is that Barça's payroll is 30 to 40% higher than that of a team of the same European standing, Liverpool, Bayern, etc.
“Hallucinates the Spanish economist.
A deeper evil
For Marc Ciria i Roig, no need to look very far for the reasons for these errors in judgment.
“There is a total lack of sports policy at Barça in recent years, he laments.
After Neymar left, we found ourselves with a whole bunch of people whose job is not who put their nose in the sports field and who started to do things that were not relevant. their skills: buy players.
These people know how to run businesses, no problem with that, but they certainly did not have the skills to say whether this or that player was necessary for the good of the club.
"
But these visionaries did not appear on a beautiful morning in August 2017. Marcos Lopez: “In reality, if we look closely at the recent history of Barça, we say to ourselves that things had started to turn badly long before the transfer by Neymar.
In fact, the last to have managed to renew the squad properly was Zubizarreta in 2014 [Jordi Alba, Ter Stegen, Luis Suarez and Rakitic].
Since that date, everything has started to go wrong.
His departure in January 2015 created a mess in sports management that has never been repaired since.
After him, we had Ruben Fernandez [the one who recruited Dembélé], Pep Segura, Eric Abidal and Ramon Planas.
In other words, in five years, between 2015 and 2020, Barça had four sports directors, it's not serious… ”.
A Barça Socio demanding the departure of President Bartomeu last summer.
- Pau BARRENA / AFP
An observation shared by Tracy Rodrigo, journalist for the site Furia Liga specializing in Spanish football.
“Some journalists, socios or supporters sounded the alarm bell long before that,” she recalls.
Already in 2015, when Barça made the treble Liga-Champions League-Spanish Cup, the balance seemed precarious both sportingly and behind the scenes, where changes that may seem minor but which touched the soul of Barça were undertaken, especially in training.
But when you win, it is difficult to convince that all is not well done internally… ”
From there to seeing in the earthquake caused by the flight of the Brazilian an evil for a good, there is only one step that the journalist and fan of Barça does not hesitate to take: "His departure and the envelope of which Barça benefited have allowed in quotes to publicly show the problems of sporting and economic management of the club and more precisely of its direction.
I think that with another direction, the departure of the Brazilian could have allowed a salutary renewal at that time.
Unfortunately Josep Bartomeu played "sauve-qui-peut".
A dangerous game which will have pushed him to resign even before suffering the humiliation of a vote of censure of the members already in the pipes in September.
Since then, Barça has been sailing on sight pending the new elections scheduled for March 7.
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