Pique, Gerard (1987- )

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    Gerard Piqué’s Kings League Has Seen Soccer’s Future

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    Gerard Piqué has always been an ideas guy. He has, at various times, had ideas about industries as disconnected as isotonic sports drinks and international tennis tournaments. He has invested in the sunglasses business and the cellphone video game industry. He has dabbled in media rights and soccer team ownership and organic burgers.For a long time, Piqué did all of that while also being one of the standout soccer players of his generation, a cornerstone on a series of Barcelona squads that harvested glory in industrial quantities and a key component on a Spanish national team that won a World Cup and a European Championship. Excelling at soccer, though, was never enough.“One of the first things he said to me was that he had finished training by 12,” said Nicolas Julia, the founder of the digital sports platform Sorare. “Some of his teammates liked to play video games. Some were happy hanging out with their families. He loved to go to the office and build something.”He was driven to do so, those who have worked with him say, because he knew that soccer would not last forever. “I think he saw a lot of his teammates retire and have nothing to do,” said Javier Alonso, a former colleague. “They were only 35 but had no real life except eating in nice restaurants and playing padel. He did not want that.”Piqué played his last game for Barcelona in November.Albert Gea/ReutersPiqué was well suited to his side hustle. He is not, by all accounts, much given to sleep. He is a natural networker, a frequent and instinctive schmoozer. His decade-long relationship with the pop singer Shakira gave him a profile outside sports. He has a mind one associate described with the Spanish word “inquieto”: restless, curious, perhaps just a touch easily distracted. He is far more flexible than might be expected of someone so famous, Alonso said, adding, “He is happy to listen to experts.”Indeed, Piqué found his side career so rewarding that late last year he decided to bring it front and center. A couple of weeks before the start of the World Cup, he declared Barcelona’s next game would be his last. Business had “never been an afterthought for him,” Julia said. Now, he wanted to go all in.Rather than fit his work around his training schedule, Piqué now devotes much of his time to Kosmos, the investment vehicle he established in 2018 with the help of capital from Hiroshi Mikitani, the founder of the Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, a former Barcelona shirt sponsor.He had used it to invest in areas “he understands the most,” as Julia put it, usually at the intersection of sports and technology. There was a production arm, focused largely on sports documentaries, and an athlete management wing. He had set up an e-sports team and taken over the running of F.C. Andorra, a minor league soccer club in Spain.There have been successes: Sorare has grown exponentially since his investment; F.C. Andorra has been promoted to Spain’s second tier for the first time; and Koi, his e-sports franchise, has become a major player.Piqué, center, and the Kosmos chief executive, Oriol Querol, left, drew up the basics of the Kings League over a single lunch appointment.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesHis two biggest plays, though, have been wreathed in controversy. In 2020, Kosmos helped arrange a deal to stage the Spanish Super Cup in Saudi Arabia. When it emerged that Piqué, then an active player, had reportedly received a $25.9 million commission, both he and the Spanish soccer federation had to insist there was nothing illegal about the arrangement.Then, this year, the International Tennis Federation prematurely ended his most valuable, high-profile project: a $3 billion, 25-year deal with Kosmos, signed in 2018, to turn the Davis Cup into a World Cup-style event. Both sides have subsequently threatened to sue the other.Those setbacks, though, have not discouraged Piqué. As Alonso, a former chief executive of the company, once said of Kosmos: “What we do here is Gerard dreams, and we try to make those dreams a reality.” His latest dream is an ambitious one. Piqué wants to take the game that made him a star, and make it better.Waning AttentionThe future of soccer appeared to Piqué while he was on his way to lunch. Not so much the fine details: the dodgeball-style kickoffs, the secret weapons and the guest stars disguised by lucha libre masks all came later. But by the time he had finished his 15-minute walk from his office in Barcelona to the restaurant, the big picture was clear in his mind.Soccer’s central problem, as Piqué diagnosed it, was this: For an audience raised on a diet of bite-size content and guided by the instant satisfaction algorithms of YouTube and Twitch and TikTok, 90 minutes is actually quite a long time.The traditional soccer game, he decided, contains far too many opportunities for eyes to wander: throw-ins, say, or teams getting their marking schemes right during corners. Younger viewers, Piqué was convinced, would not stand for that. The sport he had always loved would have to adapt.Piqué and his partners reimagined everything from kickoffs to penalty shootouts when they created the Kings League. But they’re open to changing the rules at any time. Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesHow? He and Oriol Querol, the chief executive of Kosmos, spitballed ideas on their lunchtime stroll. Soccer should be shorter, for one. It had to minimize the natural pauses, or find a way to fill them. It had to copy and adopt the rhythms and features of video games and streaming and reality television to meet the viewers in their natural habitat.By the time Piqué and Querol arrived for lunch, they had the outline of an idea. Within a few months, it would have a form: the Kings League, a seven-a-side competition staged in an indoor arena in Barcelona. Its dozen teams are largely made up of former players, and owned and run by some of the country’s most prominent streamers.By the metrics Piqué, Querol and their colleagues care about, it has been an overwhelming success. It accrued some 238 million views on TikTok in January — more, Querol pointed out, than all of Europe’s traditional leagues combined. More than two million people watched some or all of a single round of games at the end of February on Twitch, TikTok and YouTube.Ronaldinho, the former Brazil and Barcelona forward, was one of several high-profile pros who lent their star power to the Kings League.Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockRonaldinho played for Porcinos, the team owned by the streamer Ibai Llanos. His live commentary only brought more attention to the league.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesIts Final Four-style playoffs, held on March 26, took place in the considerably grander surrounds of Camp Nou, the stadium where Piqué spent 14 years as a cornerstone of an all-conquering Barcelona team. The steep stands were packed with 92,000 ticket-buying fans.That popularity has not been universally welcomed. Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, has been the most prominent, outspoken critic. The Kings League, he has said, is not a serious rival to his competition. It is just a “circus,” he contends, filled with “streamers dressed up like clowns.”Piqué has been unmoved. The traditional “product of soccer is outdated,” he said in response to Tebas. It is in desperate need of “more stimulating rules” to attract and engage a new generation of fans. He knew as he went to lunch that soccer had to change. The Kings League is his attempt to change it.EnigmaAt the turn of the year, a few months after their relationship ended, Shakira released a song that contained a number of extremely thinly veiled critiques of Piqué. The most barbed centered on his apparent infidelity. In one line, the singer accused him of trading “a Ferrari for a Twingo.”A couple of days after the song came out, with his nascent competition still aggravating all the right people, Piqué duly turned up at the league’s headquarters in Barcelona at the wheel of a tiny white Renault Twingo. As he climbed, a little uneasily, out of the car, he grinned at the handful of photographers waiting for him. His smile betrayed a confidence that his joke would land.Players of the 1K Team, which is owned by a former Spain goalkeeper, Iker Casillas.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThe move was typical of the marketing strategy he adopted for the first season of the Kings League. He was not necessarily above turning his personal life into a promotional tool if it might generate interest: In reference to another line in the same song, suggesting he had swapped a “Rolex for a Casio,” he would later claim (sarcastically) that the Japanese watchmaker had come on board as a sponsor.He was happy to stoke controversy, too, even if it acted as an open invitation to the league’s critics. In an early round of games, one team featured a mystery player, clad in a mask to hide his identity and registered only as Enigma. The player was, the Kings League let it be known, currently employed by a team in La Liga. (This was not strictly true.) The infamy was worth it for the intrigue.Those confected dramas might seem to bear out Tebas’s assessment of the Kings League as a circus, one that is not so much a pioneering vision of the future as a veterans’ seven-a-side league garlanded by novelties and promoted with gimmicks.Its evident popularity, though, warrants greater reflection. It has, as the sight of the heaving stands of Camp Nou made clear, found an audience. Much of that can be attributed, of course, to the presence not only of Piqué, Sergio Agüero and Iker Casillas, all of whom serve as team presidents, but also the likes of Ibai Llanos, the Spanish streamer, and Gerard Romero, a wildly popular online soccer journalist.“The streamers were the key,” Querol said. “You can make a case that Ibai is the most famous person in Spain now.”The Kings League is as much a media venture as a soccer one; it favors a “total access” approach in which even referee’s conversations are broadcast.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesViewers who have tuned in to see them, though, have at the very least not been deterred by the “more stimulating rules,” drawn from a wide array of sources, that Piqué and his colleagues believe are vital for soccer to continue to flourish.The concept of a player draft comes directly from American sports. Others are more esoteric: Kings League kickoffs, which feature both teams charging en masse for the ball, are drawn from water polo, and it has revived an approach to penalties last seen in Major League Soccer in the 1990s. (It is telling that one feature inherited from old-school soccer is a postseason transfer market: Piqué and Kosmos have identified that nobody is bored of transfer rumors.)“We took some things from e-sports, too,” said Querol, citing not only the decision to stream everything before, during and after games, but also a “total access” approach in which viewers can hear what referees and players are saying.“Then we took things like each team having a secret weapon in each game, something they can use whenever they think it might have the most impact, whether it is a penalty or an extra player, from video games,” Querol added. “But none of it is static. It’s constant reflection. We change whatever we can change.”Kings League matches are designed to hold the attention of viewers accustomed to the constant stimuli of streaming and gaming.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThat process continued through the season. When Querol and his team noticed that games tended to drift at the end of the first half, they started cutting the number of players on the field at that precise moment. Anything, in other words, to keep the audience on its toes, to ensure that something was happening, to stop the eye from drifting and the thumb from scrolling.“It is sport,” Querol said. “It wouldn’t work if the soccer was not of a high standard. That is really important.” But that is not the only consideration. In his view, as in Piqué’s, soccer cannot just be soccer anymore. “The priority,” he said, “has to be the spectacle.”That, perhaps, is the point that all those critics who dismissed the Kings League have missed. It may well be a circus. But Piqué might respond that there is nothing wrong with being a circus. Circuses are popular. They draw a crowd, they hold the gaze, because nobody is ever quite sure what is coming next.Iker Casillas with a young fan. His investment in Pique’s venture shows promise: More than 92,000 fans showed up for the Kings League final. Samuel Aranda for The New York Times More

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      Why Are Soccer's Stars Talking to Ibai Llanos?

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      Outside, in the bright Parisian sunshine, the world’s news media lined up on the edge of the field at the Parc des Princes. Producers fiddled busily with cameras and boom microphones. Reporters chattered away, dutifully filling airtime before their designated interview slots.They were under strict instructions and constraints: three questions apiece, a few minutes, no more, to mine the details of the biggest sports story of the summer, to get to the heart of a transfer that ended one era and ushered in another. And then their time would be up, and Lionel Messi would have to move on.Ibai Llanos’s setup was different. He had been ushered inside the players’ tunnel, along with two of his oldest friends, Ander Cortés and Borja Nanclares. They had no sound equipment. They were filming on a phone. Yet Llanos had, at that point, an audience of half a million people watching him.Llanos, 26, had, without really trying or particularly meaning to, usurped every news outlet on the planet. Messi’s first interview after leaving F.C. Barcelona for Paris St.-Germain would not be with a television network or a major newspaper. It would instead go out exclusively on Llanos’s Twitch channel.Over the last couple of years, Llanos has interviewed a succession of soccer’s biggest names, from Sergio Ramos to Paulo Dybala. He now counts some stars, like Sergio Agüero, as friends, and others, like Gerard Piqué, as business partners.Players who habitually distrust the news media have been happy to spend as much as a couple of hours talking to Llanos on Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming service. That is turning him into a breakout star of the internet age in Spain and, at times, occasionally invoking the wrath of journalists from more traditional outlets who envy the access he enjoys and disdain his lack of training.Llanos, with the Argentine creator Momo, got his start as a teenager by filming himself and his friends playing video games. Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThe interview with Messi was, by some distance, the most high-profile moment of his relatively brief career. It was also, from a journalistic perspective, a little unorthodox. Llanos was nervous. When he watched the video later, he saw that he had been threading a pen between his fingers throughout his talk with Messi without noticing. “It was a bit like having vertigo,” he said.Operating under the same strictures as everyone else, Llanos asked Messi if he had “eaten a lot” at the farewell dinner he had held for some of his closest friends in Barcelona a couple of days earlier. “Did I behave myself?” Llanos asked. Messi assured him that he had.Llanos asked Messi only one soccer question, on the appeal of playing alongside Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, and so there was only one soccer answer, delivered in that dampening monotone players adopt whenever their sport is brought up. Mostly, the entire exchange was light and cordial, its intimacy only undercut by Llanos’s referring to the world’s best soccer player as “Messi” — not Lionel, not Leo, not Señor Messi, but the word on the back of his jersey, somewhere between an honorific and a schoolyard nickname — throughout.That was exactly what Llanos had promised. “I am not going to ask him about Mauricio Pochettino’s tactics,” he had explained on his livestream just before Messi arrived. Llanos is not a journalist. He does not pretend to be a journalist. He is not trying to become a journalist. And that is what allowed him to get the exclusive every journalist wanted.Llanos has been a streamer since before the term existed. At age 15, he and some friends from Bilbao, his hometown in Spain, set up a YouTube channel, filming themselves playing the video game Call Of Duty. “It was growing, but it wasn’t so normal at the time to see gaming on YouTube,” Llanos said.They built a small but impressive audience — some videos attracted 20,000 viewers, he said — and earned a little money. “It was 30 euros a month, something like that,” he said. “It wasn’t money to live on, just to buy a little bit of equipment. It was a hobby, a pastime. It wasn’t a business.”He was still deciding “what to do with my life” when he noticed an advertisement for a casting call from the Liga de Videojuegos Profesional (L.V.P.), Spain’s esports league, looking for announcers. He and Cortés applied and, in August 2014, got the job.The pay was initially “quite low,” Llanos said, but he enjoyed the start-up energy not only of the company, but also the scene. “There was a lot of love,” he said. As the league grew, so did his profile. “There were more and more events, collaborations with brands, athletes,” he said. He moved to Barcelona. He did an ad for the release of the PlayStation 5.But Llanos turned into a more mainstream cultural phenomenon only last year. He had left the L.V.P. just before the coronavirus pandemic — “there was a bit of a generational shift, and I felt saturated” — and dedicated himself to creating content for an esports team, G2 eSports, streamed on his own Twitch channel. Cortés, Nanclares and several other creators joined him.Everything changed with the pandemic. As Spain went into lockdown, its population cloistered at home, Llanos saw his viewership figures explode: His Twitch channel currently commands 7.8 million followers, making him one of the 10 most followed creators on the platform. His YouTube account attracts a similar audience.After he announced plans for a virtual version of La Liga — filling the void left by the suspended league — it emerged that a number of high-profile players already ranked among his fans, including Sergio Reguilón, the Tottenham defender; Borja Iglesias, now of Real Betis; and Messi’s new teammate at P.S.G., Achraf Hakimi.“There are a lot of players that play video games in their free time,” Llanos said. “And because they could not go out, because in the first lockdown they did not have training or games, they had more time to dedicate to it.”Llanos streams his videos and interviews from the basement of his house near Barcelona. Sometimes, star players pop in for visits.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThe most significant guest, though, may have been Aymeric Laporte, the Manchester City and Spain defender. “Laporte was already following me,” Llanos said. “We agreed to play Fortnite and stream it, and while we were playing he told me that he had messaged Sergio Agüero and invited him to play, and asked if it would be OK if he joined us. It was his first time on Twitch.”Others have followed. Earlier this year, Llanos launched a weekly, longform interview segment on his channel: Charlando Tranquilamente, or Chatting Quietly. The likes of Dybala, the Juventus forward, Ramos, the former Real Madrid captain, and Agüero himself have all appeared as guests.That a 26-year-old streamer could attract names of that magnitude sparked criticism from more traditional news media outlets.“Who is Ibai? I called Agüero for an interview, but Ibai beats me, and if Ibai beats me, I have to retire,” the Argentine announcer Gustavo López said. “They talk to the powerful, and disregard those of us who are paid in pesos.” Others derided Llanos as an “entertainer,” rather than a journalist.To Llanos, though, that is kind of the point. “Maybe I am the sort of person they like,” he said of players. “A little bit different.” He does not attempt to pry into their personal lives. He does not try to ask them challenging questions about what, for them, is often simply their work. Instead, he tries to talk to them as informally as possible, while doing something — playing video games — that they enjoy.“They come because they like it,” he said. “They don’t get paid. They come because they want to come.”The players’ motivation is perhaps a little more calculating than that. “Twitch is the Generation Z platform,” said Julian Aquilina, a broadcasting specialist at the media research firm Enders Analysis. “It skews very young, and quite male. It is quite a different audience to traditional broadcasters.” Llanos offers a precious route into that audience: His interview with Dybala, for example, attracted more than 100,000 live, largely teenage viewers.That soccer’s biggest stars find it a more appealing prospect than a more formal interview, though, is not in doubt. “Twitch has much more of a community vibe,” Aquilina said. “It’s much more interactive.” To at least one of Llanos’s guests, the allure was that talking to Llanos did not feel like an interview at all. There was no camera, no sound equipment, no call-and-response of questions, no defined structure. The players feel safe talking to someone who seems like a friend.In his underground studio, Llanos can play a game, interview a soccer star and stream it all live at the same time.Samuel Aranda for The New York TimesThat, ultimately, has been the secret to his success. He and Agüero have grown close enough that the striker invited Llanos, surreptitiously, to Messi’s farewell dinner in Barcelona. The encounter earned Llanos his invitation to Paris, to Messi’s presentation, and to his world exclusive.At the table that night, too, was another player now firmly in Llanos’s orbit: Gerard Piqué. The Barcelona defender was the first guest on his talk show segment; he is now, in effect, Llanos’s business partner.In August, the two men bought an e-sports team. This was after Piqué’s investment vehicle, Kosmos, bought the Spanish streaming rights to this summer’s Copa América, and broadcast it on Llanos’s Twitch channel. It did the same for Messi’s first game as a P.S.G. player last month.That match also was shown on Telecinco, a Spanish broadcast network. About 6.7 million people watched at least a little of the game on television; Llanos attracted roughly 2 million viewers (though he also has a large following in Latin America, so the figures are not immediately comparable).It is an approach, Aquilina said, that may become more common. “Twitch is becoming a broadcaster,” he said. “Amazon has done that with some N.F.L. games, putting them on Twitch as well as Prime. If you have the rights to something, you want it distributed across platforms: You can sell the broadcast rights but still have an online presence.”Llanos was not thinking about that, he said, that day in Paris. He was, instead, simultaneously dealing with the nerves from “the most pressure I have ever felt,” and marveling a little at “being able to do this with two of my best friends.” The combination was enough to give him that dizzying feeling of vertigo. He, and the revolution he represents, are not going anywhere, though. He will get used to the height. More

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      Lionel Messi, Barcelona and the Crippling Cost of Success

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      Credit…Associated PressThe Great ReadBarcelona and the Crippling Cost of SuccessThe world’s richest soccer club is facing a financial crisis. Executives blame the pandemic, but many of its biggest problems, including its enormous debt to Lionel Messi, are its own fault.Credit…Associated PressSupported byContinue reading the main storyTariq Panja and Feb. 12, 2021Updated 9:53 a.m. ETThe careful plan hatched by Barcelona, the richest soccer club in the world, fell apart almost as soon as its negotiators entered the room.On a sweltering late summer afternoon, Barcelona’s executives had come to one of Monte Carlo’s most exclusive hotels to strike a deal with the German club Borussia Dortmund for one of the most exciting young prospects in Europe: the French forward Ousmane Dembélé.Barcelona had decided on its strategy, and its price: Dembélé, in Barcelona’s eyes, was worth $96 million, and not a cent more. No matter how hard Dortmund pressed for a higher fee, the men from Barcelona would hold firm. The two executives steeled themselves as they headed to the suite the Germans had booked. They embraced before knocking on the door. And then they stepped inside, only to find that Dortmund’s executives had decided on a strategy, too.The Germans told their guests that they had a plane to catch. They had no time to exchange small talk, and they were not here to negotiate. If Barcelona wanted Dembélé, it would have to pay roughly double the Spaniards’ valuation: $193 million. The price would make the 20-year-old Frenchman the second-most expensive soccer player in history.Barcelona’s president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, was stunned. But he did not walk away. He quickly agreed to pay almost the entire amount, settling at a fee of $127 million up front, with a further $50 million in easily-achieved performance bonuses. For all his intentions of playing hardball, he felt he did not have a choice.Only a few weeks earlier, Barcelona had seen one of its own crown jewels, Neymar, plucked by Paris St.-Germain. Bartomeu could not risk disappointing a fan base still reeling from that blow by returning home empty-handed. He needed a marquee signing, a trophy, a trinket. He had to pay the price.The Billion Dollar ClubFans at Camp Nou in 2019, the year Barcelona surpassed $1 billion in revenue. The club’s structure gives members a strong say in team affairs but also makes executives eager to please them.Credit…Lluis Gene/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesF.C. Barcelona has, for much of the last decade, had the look of a sporting and commercial colossus. This century, its on-field success and its off-field wealth have made it the envy of even its most bitter rivals.It is the first (and only) team to surpass $1 billion in annual revenue. It employs arguably the finest player in history, Lionel Messi. On matchdays, the cavernous, iconic stadium it calls home fills with almost 100,000 card-carrying, dues-paying club members.But Barcelona has been living on the edge for much of its recent history, a consequence of years of impulsive management, rash decisions and imprudent contracts. For years, soaring revenues helped paper over its worst mistakes, but the coronavirus has now changed the math.One former board member believes the pandemic will eventually cost the team more than half a billion dollars in revenue. Its salary bill is the highest in Europe. It has already broken debt covenants it agreed to with its creditors, which will almost certainly mean higher interest costs in the future.The result is that the club that brings in more money than any other in world soccer now faces a crisis: not only a crushing financial squeeze, but a contentious presidential election and potentially even the loss of its crown jewel, Messi. Its hurried pursuit of Dembélé, among others, is only one part of how it got here.Even as Bartomeu finalized that deal, in August 2017, Barcelona knew it had been stung. The club had banked $222 million from the sale of Neymar weeks earlier and now needed a flashy signing to change the conversation. Every seller in Europe, though, knew Barcelona was cash-rich and time-poor. “You have a weaker negotiating position,” said Jordi Moix, Bartomeu’s former vice president for economic affairs. “They’re waiting for you.”If any club could afford to overpay, though, it was Barcelona. Over the previous decade, it had been transformed into not only the best team in the world — the winner of three Champions League titles in seven years — but also its greatest moneymaking machine.Its revenues were then inching ever closer to the target of one billion euros set by Bartomeu in 2015. It hit the mark — in dollars, at least — in 2019, two years ahead of schedule. Plans for a sleek entertainment and leisure district around the team’s stadium and the launch of the Barcelona Innovation Hub would keep the river of money flowing.At the same time, though, the club was walking an increasingly delicate financial tightrope. There is another billion-dollar watermark it has passed: its total debt, including the amount owed to banks, tax authorities, rival teams and its own players, has ballooned to more than 1.1 billion euros.More than 60 percent of that is considered short-term debt — more than any team in Europe — but that did not stop the lavish spending in the transfer market: not only the price paid for Dembélé but, a few months later, the $145 million committed for the capture of Philippe Coutinho from Liverpool — another negotiation in which Barcelona folded, and agreed to a price it could not afford to pay.The burden of paying the players already on the club’s books, too, has continued to grow. According to Carles Tusquets, its interim president since Bartomeu was deposed last year, Barcelona’s annual salary bill of $771 million now eats up 74 percent of the club’s annual income, a much larger slice than its contemporaries, many of whom aim to keep that percentage no higher than 60. “It is an awful lot,” Tusquets said.The pandemic slashed Barcelona’s revenue, but not its expenses.Credit…F.C. BarcelonaIn some ways, Barcelona was a victim of its own success. The more its players won, the greater the figures they could command in salary negotiations. The fact that so much of its squad — the likes of Messi but also Gerard Piqué, Sergio Busquets and Jordi Alba — were seen as the spiritual soul of the club, visible proof of the road from the club’s La Masia academy to the first team, gave the players, not the club, leverage.“Clearly a lack of leadership, the leadership of the board being afraid to say no, is one of the key things that needs to be avoided going forward,” said Víctor Font, one of the candidates to become the club’s next president when elections are held in March. “Wages had gone too high.”But when the club could rely on revenues tipping $1 billion every year, paying out almost $700 million in salaries was “a stress, but affordable,” Moix said, adding: “It did not give us much room for savings, but they were the backbone of the team. If we did not make the agreements, they would have gone.”Moix admitted that Bartomeu and his board made mistakes, but he is convinced that it was an event outside of their control that finally tipped the club off its high-wire. “As time goes by things will be put in perspective,” he said. “How much is due to management, how much to Covid? It’s a subjective discussion.”Barcelona’s 99,000-seat stadium, Camp Nou, has been shuttered for nearly a year. A club official expects the pandemic to cost the team about $600 million in lost revenue.Credit…Joan Monfort/Associated PressEither way, the scale of the damage is vast. In its most recent financial reports, Barcelona announced a loss for the year of $117 million. It estimates that it already has lost $246 million as a result of the pandemic. Moix suggested the total hit eventually will top $600 million.At the same time, its debt to financial institutions and other clubs has risen by $327 million. Barcelona executives believe that figure — despite drastic efforts to cut costs — will climb further in 2021. Both its stadium and museum, two of Spain’s most popular tourist destinations, are likely to remain shut to visitors for at least the rest of this season.With its forecast revenues for the next year revised down by $250 million, its players’ salaries may soon account for as much as eighty cents of every dollar brought into the club. The same squad that brought Barcelona such glory in the recent past seems, now, to foreshadow toil in the immediate future.And there is no clearer example of that than the player who — above all — has come to symbolize this Barcelona, the player on whose shoulders its rise to global pre-eminence rested and whose salary, now, represents its single greatest financial commitment: Lionel Messi.PharaohBarcelona’s former president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, and Messi on the day the star signed his current contract. The four-year deal will pay him almost $675 million.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe contract Messi signed with Barcelona — in the fall of 2017, in the aftermath of Neymar’s departure — runs to 30 pages, according to a Spanish newspaper that was leaked a copy of the document. It contains a screed of eye-watering figures: a signing bonus of $139 million. A “loyalty” bonus of $93 million. A total value, if Messi meets every clause and every condition, of almost $675 million.Last month, the newspaper that revealed its contents, El Mundo, described it as “Pharaonic,” a deal that was “ruining Barcelona.” That Messi was the world’s best-paid player was not a surprise: It had been reported at the time the contract was agreed that he would earn an annual salary of around $132 million.To those outside Barcelona, it was seeing the sheer scale of the deal in black and white that was most striking. To those inside the club, though, the problem was not the figures but that they had been revealed to the public. Ronald Koeman, Barcelona’s coach, called for anyone found responsible for leaking the contract to be excommunicated. The club threatened to take legal action. Messi, too, was furious at what he perceived as an attempt to sabotage his standing at the club.Messi’s relationship with Barcelona has been strained for some time. But last summer, after a third consecutive season of disappointment and a historic 8-2 humbling in the Champions League, his frustration boiled over and he gave the club formal notice that he intended to end his contract and leave.Bartomeu refused even to countenance the idea. If any suitor wanted to sign Messi, he declared, it would have to pay a fee. Though Messi saw that as the breaking of not just a promise but a contractual obligation, he eventually backed down, unwilling to take the club he has represented since he was 13 to court in order to force his exit.Six months later, his future is no more certain. His deal expires in June. Since Jan. 1, he has been free to agree to a move this summer to any club outside Spain. In a television interview last month, he said he would “wait until the season ends” before making any decision. “If I do leave,” he said, “I want to leave in the best way possible.”Letting Messi walk away this summer would ease Barcelona’s cash crisis, but it is a solution both fans and executives consider unthinkable.Credit…Marcelo Del Pozo/ReutersThough it is taboo for it to be said in public — and though nobody would welcome it — there are those inside Barcelona who believe Messi’s departure may be a necessary evil. Last summer, a few whispered that it made sense to cash in on Messi while the club still could, and not just because the transfer fee and the savings on his nine-figure salary could add more $250 million to the team’s bottom line.Given his status, and his impact, few believe Messi himself is overpaid, but some members of the previous board wondered if he had an inflationary effect on the squad as a whole. Barcelona was paying out salaries worth hundreds of thousands of euros a week to fringe players. Messi’s earnings had raised the wage ceiling so high that the salaries of his teammates — especially the senior, home-reared ones — were rising quickly alongside it.Moix, for his part, did not share that logic. “We can’t negotiate with an asset like this,” he said. Nor could Barcelona, really, negotiate at all; there are only a few clubs in the world capable of meeting Messi’s salary and his ambition, and none were eager to pay a premium for a player they might be able to get for free this summer.Regardless, according to Moix, fixing a price for Messi proved irrelevant. “It is a theoretical question whether we would have sold him for 100 million euros,” he said. “Nobody made an offer.”Fire SaleThe former Barcelona president Joan Laporta is running to regain his old post. Credit…Oscar Del Pozo/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs the club’s presidential election draws closer, each candidate is trying to position himself as the only man — and they are all men — with a solution to the financial crisis.But Barcelona’s charm, in a sense, is also its curse: Every move the club makes has to be made not only with the support of whoever wins the election on March 7, but with the backing of its 140,000-strong membership.“It makes it a bit more difficult to manage,” Moix said. “But that fact is also one of the differences we use to try to attract sponsors and business. The members are the real owners.”In the past, that has contributed to the club’s largess: Bartomeu might not have been so desperate to land Dembélé, whatever the cost, had he not feared a fan revolt if he failed. Font, one of his potential successors, is convinced the lack of professional experience among previous boards has led to some of the poor decision-making.Joan Laporta, a former president now running for his old post, last year labeled Barcelona “the club of three billion: one billion in income, one billion in expenses and one billion in debt.” He, like his rivals, has vowed to repair the team’s financial fortunes.“It’s not your money but you can’t just do what you want,” Font said. “It has nothing to do with ownership structure, it has to do with poor governance, people who are not equipped to make decisions. For them it’s fun. It’s like a fun toy, I play with it, and I make decisions I believe make sense. That’s why you need people that understand playing with a toy in the wrong way can be dangerous.”Now, though, it leaves the three remaining candidates for president with the toughest of electoral sells: promising cutbacks while continuing to meet the fans’ expectations. Most accept that the club’s salary commitments will have to be reduced, though that is rather easier said than done.Just as Borussia Dortmund realized that Barcelona, in 2017, was in no position to haggle, European soccer — ravaged by the pandemic — is well aware that it is now, in effect, a distressed seller. Its players are unlikely to command premium prices, if buyers in a position to pay distorted salaries for aging stars can be found in the first place.That has forced executives to examine other measures to try to alleviate the financial strain. Some of the costs — like an annual payment of five million euros to Atlético Madrid, a putative rival, for first refusal on any of its players — make little sense. Others, like seven-figure payments for past signings, are already baked in.Víctor Font, a business executive, and Toni Freixa, a lawyer, will face Laporta in next month’s election. To win, each must balance hard truths and fan expectations.Credit…Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockFor now, the club has been scrambling to renegotiate some of what it owes with its creditors, but it is likely that any attempt will mean doing so on worse terms.It is exploring whether it can be granted an advance on future television income — worth around $190 million per season — or strike an innovative deal, designed by Goldman Sachs, to raise $240 million by selling a stake in a basket of Barcelona’s nonsporting assets — including its content creation business and its merchandising operation. The response, according to people familiar with the offer, has been positive.Font said officials had pitched details of the money-raising plans to him, but he remains unconvinced. “We have a saying in Spanish: bread for today, hunger for tomorrow,” he said.Goldman Sachs also has agreed on a proposal with the club to arrange financing for a $988 million refit of the Camp Nou, a stadium that does not have a single sky box and is mostly uncovered. The project — which requires member approval — also includes for the creation of other properties, including a smaller, secondary stadium.There is, of course, one other option. Allowing Messi to leave might solve many of the problems on the balance sheet in one fell swoop, and buy the club some breathing space. But while all of the candidates talk of the need to restore financial sanity, that is a road nobody is willing to take.“The best player in the history of such a sport generates a lot of commercial value,” Font said. He is so determined to ensure that Messi stays that he would offer him a lifetime contract, one that would bond the player to the club even after he has retired. It would be fitting reward, after all, for the player who — more than any other — brought Barcelona here.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More