Barcelona and La Liga’s salary limit: Can they afford Nico Williams?

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A version of his article was first published on June 5. It has been updated to reflect Barcelona’s €60m pursuit of Nico Williams. 

Barcelona’s 2024-25 campaign was thrilling on the pitch — but there were equally dramatic twists and turns off it.

Hansi Flick’s team won a domestic treble of La Liga, Copa del Rey and Supercopa de Espana titles while falling agonisingly short in the Champions League semi-finals against Inter. At the same time, we saw the club once again scramble to deal with their deep financial problems and La Liga’s strict salary cap rules.

The most dramatic situation came during the January transfer window, when Spanish government intervention was required for Barca to field attacking midfielder Dani Olmo and back-up forward Pau Victor for the second half of last season.

Further drama appears very likely this summer — as Barca are already making big moves in the transfer market.

On Wednesday, Espanyol goalkeeper Joan Garcia signed after Barca met his €25million (£21.4m, $28.8m) release clause. On Thursday, The Athletic reported that the club has reached a verbal agreement with Nico Williams over personal terms before a potential €60m move. At the start of this week, however, La Liga president Javier Tebas said Barca still have big financial issues to resolve.

Here, we sum up Barca’s current financial situation and attempt to predict what may happen between now and the end of the transfer window. We also explain why a set of VIP seats at the Camp Nou could be key.

Will Barca be able to register new signings?

For years now, Barca’s problem has not been finding significant funds to buy players, but registering many of these signings with La Liga.

The main difficulty is that they have yet to really resolve their past financial problems — including at least €1.3bn of debt from when Laporta returned as president in 2021.

Another issue is that the short-term solutions — often called levers — deployed to raise money to spend on transfers have not always been accepted by La Liga, who want the club to be run in a more sustainable way.

Olmo faced a saga over his registration with Barca last season (Aitor Alcalde/Getty Images)

Barca have regularly viewed this as unfair limitation on their activities, and looked to find creative ways to register players — such as when Olmo and Victor were registered for the first half of the 2024-25 campaign using a rule that allows for the temporary replacement of players ruled out through long-term injuries (in that case defender Andreas Christensen).

In January, La Liga revoked their registrations after concluding Barca were in breach of their salary limit. Barca were only able to re-register the players when, in April, the Spanish government’s High Council of Sports (CSD) sports court forced La Liga to do so.

That CSD ruling did not question Spanish football’s financial controls, but stated the joint committee formed by La Liga and the Spanish football federation (RFEF) did not have the power to revoke Olmo and Victor’s licenses in early January.

La Liga has confirmed to The Athletic this means the pair are now registered to play for Barca until the end of their contracts in 2030 (Olmo) and 2029 (Victor) — although a La Liga appeal of that CSD decision to a different court has yet to be heard.

La Liga still maintains Barca did not have space in their salary limit to register Olmo and Victor back in January. And on Tuesday, La Liga president Javier Tebas said Barcelona are still not in line with their salary-limit rules.

Commenting on Barca’s €25m move for goalkeeper Garcia (which was completed on Wednesday), Tebas said: “Barca need to do some things to register Joan Garcia. Not a lot of things, but they know what they need to do in that regard. I am not going to reveal them here. One thing is to make the signing official, the other one is: can they register him?”

Right now, Barca’s room for manoeuvre this summer will be limited unless they can raise more money — either through selling players or growing the club’s income.

And VIP seats at the Camp Nou can help?

Through autumn 2024, Barca’s club hierarchy tried various ways to raise money to register Olmo and Victor permanently with La Liga. A new kit deal with Nike helped, but was not enough. Barca even took a legal case against the regulations to a Catalan court but were unsuccessful.

In December, Barca’s board decided to sell future revenues from 475 VIP seats at the revamped Camp Nou, which remains under construction, as another new ‘lever’.

Few details of what the club called a new Personal Seat License (PSL) business model were made public, but Laporta said at a news conference in mid-January that this raised €100m from two different investors.

This includes €70m from the UAE-based New Era Visionary Group (NEVG) owned by Moldovan businessman Ruslan Birladeanu, and €30m from the Qatari-backed, UK-based investment fund Forta Advisors Limited.

Nuevas fotos del Spotify Camp Nou 🏟️ pic.twitter.com/qfbyCkTJr0

— FC Barcelona (@FCBarcelona_es) June 3, 2025

Barca had already received the entire €30m sum from the Qatari investors and 40 per cent of the remainder (€28m), Laporta said.

Barca said when announcing the deal that both sets of investor groups had been subject to a mandatory review before the deal, and received positive reports from the club’s compliance department and economic commission.

In early April, La Liga questioned the financing of these deals, saying they had been certified by an unnamed auditor back in January.

La Liga also said Barca’s previous auditors, Grant Thornton, did not mention the €100m in its financial update on the club filed in December, nor did the new auditors, Crowe Global, mention the new income in its report to the league in early April.

Barca are planning on returning to the revamped Camp Nou for the 2025-26 season at reduced capacity (Josep Lago/AFP via Getty Images)

Barca responded with “surprise and indignation”, claiming that making public such information was “inappropriate” and that Tebas’ public comments on the matter were aimed at “destabilising” Barca.

Reports in the Catalan media have said that the 475 VIP seats (a small part of the 9,400 VIP seats the Camp Nou will have when complete) must be built for the current auditors to count this money within the club’s 2024-25 accounts.

Barca did not reply when asked for details on this, but Laporta told media outlet Jijantes in mid-May: “The (VIP seats) are done. Probably, they can be taken into account starting this month. We need to remember that La Liga fixes the salary limit when they receive our budgets.”

In early June, La Liga said it had not yet received any details about money coming from the sale of the VIP seats and so has not been able to include it yet within salary limit calculations for the coming season.

What’s the latest with Barca’s (in)famous financial levers?

The first ‘levers’ pulled by Laporta’s board were the sale of 25 per cent of Barca’s future La Liga TV rights in 2022 for a total of €400m. That means Barca make season-on-season payments of around €40m a season to U.S. investors Sixth Street.

More complex is the Barca Studios/Barca Vision project, which Laporta’s board had previously viewed as an asset that strengthened the club’s financial situation. In August 2023, it was ambitiously valued at $1billion.

Last October, with money counted on from past investors in the project not having arrived, Barca’s previous auditors mandated the value of the Barca Studios/Barca Vision asset be partly written down. This meant that instead of a €12m profit, the club’s 2023-24 loss accounts actually showed an overall net loss of €91m.

Barca boss Hansi Flick and Laporta, pictured in November (Javier Borrego/Europa Press via Getty Images)

Unless new investors are found for the project — now known as Barca Media — the current auditors will have to decide whether another write-down is required for the 2024-25 accounts. Should this happen, La Liga’s rules mean the salary limit for 2025-26 would likely need to be lowered. Asked about this issue, Barca told The Athletic that any new partners for Barca Media would be communicated using the club’s official channels.

Another unknown is a new Barca Mobile arm of the club’s commercial activities, a virtual mobile operator where users pay for roaming data plans via Barca’s website, which was launched in April 2025. Laporta predicted it would be a “goldmine” for the club.

The club’s main partner in Barca Mobile is NEVG, the same group owned by Moldovan businessman Birladeanu which bought a chunk of the VIP seats at the new Camp Nou. NEVG’s only business activities, per its website, are the contracts it has with Barca.

So what’s likely to happen?

Predicting Barca transfer windows is generally difficult, and even many of those involved behind the scenes have been surprised by events during previous summers.

As of early June, about €42m of the money being paid by NEVG for its share of future VIP revenues was yet to be received by Barcelona. Catalan media reports have suggested Birladeanu will facilitate another payment by June 30, so it can be included in the 2024-25 final accounts, but it remains to be seen whether this will actually happen. Asked about this possibility by The Athletic, Barca declined to comment, and NEVG did not reply.

Barca will also be looking to raise money and open space in their salary limit by moving on unwanted players — including Ansu Fati and Inaki Pena. Other more important squad members could potentially be sold, with defender Ronald Araujo and goalkeeper Marc-Andre ter Stegen the subject of transfer speculation over their futures.

Barcelona have actually secured some funds via a few sales this summer. Como met the €6m release clause in the contract of 21-year-old full-back Alex Valle, who had been on loan at the Italian club, while West Ham United’s €39m signing of Jean-Clair Todibo from Nice, following his season on loan, means Barca are set to earn another €7.8m, as they inserted a 20 per cent sell-on clause in the deal when selling the defender to the French side in 2021.

They have also terminated Clement Lenglet’s contract — the defender had two years left on it, and has now joined Atletico Madrid, where he was on loan last season.

Barca will want to bring in enough money to bring themselves below their squad salary limit. That would mean they can spend any funds raised, rather than being forced by La Liga’s rules to put a significant percentage (around half) towards paying off past debts. This is known as the 1:1 rule in Spain, given clubs can spend a euro for every euro they raise.

“I believe we’ll be able to sign players, we’ll be at ‘1:1’, and I hope we stay like that for many years,” Laporta told Jijantes in May. “It’s true we were pretty tight, so what we have to do is keep working. It’s always difficult, as the ‘fair play’ rules are, let’s say, ‘sui generis’ (unique). The regulations are open to interpretation. We’ll have to keep fighting. It won’t be easy, but that way it’ll be even sweeter when we do it.”

More “fighting” over the interpretation of the salary limit rules looks likely. That will not be easy, given relations with La Liga were strained even before the Olmo/Victor saga.

“I hope Barca can be 1:1 next window, but you’d have to ask them if they can do that,” Tebas told The Athletic in April.

“They know what they have to do, and we hope it does not happen 48 hours before the window closes in August. We hope not to have any more surprises.”

(Top image: Edith Geuppert – GES Sportfoto/Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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