Joan Laporta He devoted a large part of his interview to barça tv to talk about the financial situation of the club. The president assured that “it is improving given that we stopped a way of managing the club with which we were not doing well. We are recovering without being cured, but recovering. It is going slower than the sports part, in which we are better. In the economic situation we have improved because we have been able to stop a very complicated and delicate economic situation, have credibility from financial institutions, we have obtained a loan from Goldman Sachs of 595 million at 1.98% interest… The rating is a little better than the we had. Still we need more income, reduce the 450 million own funds of negative net worth, something we work tirelessly on. The debt is increasingly controlled, we have improved the interests of this debt that we have”.
the three levers
Asked about the solutions to improve the economic situation of the club, Laporta explained that you have three options for new income that you can activate, individually or together, to achieve it. “We are still in times of economic difficulty and you can’t have according to what joys, which at Barça you should never have, but there are moments of more and less. We are very aware of how to finish this season in the accounts. We have three levers to be able to activate alternately or all together and we would turn the situation around. None of these levers are perfect, we would like them to be, but they all have good and less good parts, although none are bad”.
CVC, Barça Studios and BLM
Going into more detail, the president explained what the three “levers” that you can activate to achieve your great obsession: “You have to reduce the negative net worth, with which you have to enter into a transaction either with the fund CVC (offers 270 million euros in exchange for the transfer of 8.2% of the operating profit generated by audiovisual rights over the next 50 years) or with some analogous to CVC with better conditions if CVC does not finish making us the proposal we want because there are a couple of aspects of this proposal that we do not like. We have already achieved that it is ‘equity’, that it is not more debt, but there are more things to clarify. Similar solutions to CVC are being proposed to us with other funds that could be interesting. The CVC could give us ‘fair play’ and that makes it more attractive. On Barca Studios we have the permission of the social mass to sell 49% and we will have a partner that we want to know the sector, and we want to work the metaverse and the world of virtual reality that can generate a lot of income. Also within Barça Corporate is BLM merchandising, about which there are interesting proposals. They are two businesses that we can share with a partner that contributes capital and that can make us stronger. Always taking into account that there must be a way out to be able to recover it later, these rights that we give up. That is why they are operations that are not from today to tomorrow, it is not about finding a partner and putting up money, but there are other aspects to take into consideration such as recovering these assigned rights with a repurchase option.
Laporta He was “quite satisfied because a great effort has been made in terms of salary reduction and I want to thank him. I like more to look for income than to fight against spending, but we cannot have irrational spending, at some levels we are at 40 percent above our competitors and it cannot be. I am a lawyer and I believe that contracts must be respected, we are not the one not to do it, rights must be respected, but we have achieved a significant reduction. We are still above but contracts are also going extinct. But we have to grow in income and I want to strengthen the sales department”.
Spotify, very advanced but not finished
Lastly, President Laporta explained how the negotiations with Spotify, the Swedish streaming music brand that wants to sponsor the Barça club on its shirt and other assets such as the stadium. “It’s on the right track, it’s not yet fully signed, we have to wait because we’re in talks, but we can’t say it’s done. It would be the first team jersey, the training jersey and the stadium jersey. This is very advanced but not we can say that it is finished. Linking Barça to music would be very nice but the agreement is not concluded”, he concluded
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