Barcelona Spent Its Way Into Crisis. Can It Now Spend Its Way Out?

Joan Laporta’s smile was hard to miss. Staring down from a vast digital billboard last month, the grinning image of the president of the Spanish soccer giant F.C. Barcelona covered almost an entire side of the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas.

The billboard scrolled through other images — there was one of a handful of Barcelona’s players, and another of its coach, Xavi Hernández — but soon enough it was back to Laporta. And it was that sight, a beaming president front and center in the gambling capital of the world, that was perhaps the best symbolism of the financial mess in which Barcelona currently finds itself, and of the boundless confidence of the man who says he has a plan to fix it.

Barcelona, in true Vegas style, is doubling down.

A team that less than a year ago was unable to meet its huge payroll; a business that, with losses of 487 million euros ($496 million) last year, was described by its own chief executive as “technically bankrupt”; a club that is currently saddled with debt of more than $1.3 billion, has decided the best way out of a crisis caused by financial mistakes, rich salaries and extravagant contracts is to spend its way out.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/sports/soccer/barcelona-laporta-de-jong.html