FC Barcelona reportedly secured a last-minute €100 million (£82.9 million) deal to sell VIP boxes at the newly renovated Camp Nou to Middle Eastern investors. The club hopes the sale will help it comply with financial fair play (FFP) regulations and finally finalize Dani Olmo’s registration.
With the deadline for registration fast approaching—just three days away—Barcelona were at risk of losing Olmo as a free agent, a mere six months after his €55 million (£45.6 million) move from RB Leipzig. To avoid this, club president Joan Laporta exercised a sale option on Saturday, expecting the first payment to be received before the end of the year.
This development follows a court’s rejection of Barcelona’s lawsuit, which sought an extension for Olmo’s registration beyond the year-end deadline. The club argued that denying the extension would infringe on the player’s labor rights and that the league’s economic commission lacked the authority to impose such restrictions.
However, Ignacio Fernández de Senespleda, the judge presiding over the case at Barcelona’s commercial court, rejected the appeal. This decision left Barcelona scrambling to find a solution that would allow them to meet La Liga’s FFP rules and avoid the possibility of Olmo leaving the club.
After signing Olmo in the summer, Barcelona struggled to register him until the third week of the season. They utilized Article 77 of La Liga’s regulations, which allows clubs to temporarily assign up to 80% of the salary of an injured player to another, allowing them to register Olmo using funds freed up by an Achilles injury to Andreas Christensen. However, this arrangement was only valid until the end of December.
This time frame gave the club a short window to find a sustainable solution and reach what’s known as “1:1” under FFP—balancing outgoings and income so that they can spend one euro for every euro they earn.
Barcelona had hoped a new seven-year deal with Nike would provide the necessary funds, and they also expected to use the salary space created by Marc-André ter Stegen’s knee injury to help register Olmo. However, La Liga determined that while the Nike signing bonus had been received, the club still hadn’t met their financial targets, and the funds from Ter Stegen’s injury had already been allocated to register emergency signing Wojciech Szczęsny. The court ruled in La Liga’s favor.
Unlike in 2023, La Liga’s lawyers were present in court to argue their case on December 23, after other clubs raised concerns about Barcelona’s methods. La Liga released a statement backing the court’s decision, emphasizing that the league’s financial rules were applied uniformly to all clubs. “La Liga has put in place rules of budgetary balance, using the authority given to it by law,” the statement read, adding that the necessary conditions for granting Barcelona a temporary exemption had not been met.
As a result, Olmo and fellow striker Pau Víctor faced the threat of being unavailable from January 1. Olmo’s contract includes a clause that would allow him to leave if Barcelona fails to register him. Barcelona filed an additional appeal, which will be heard by a different court on December 30, unless the VIP box sale is completed.
The club is currently in breach of the €426 million salary cap for the 2024-25 season, limiting their ability to register new players. Olmo’s annual salary, for accounting purposes, is listed at just over €21 million. According to La Liga’s statement, the purpose of Article 77 is to prevent a serious injury from hindering a team’s competitiveness, not to allow clubs to register players whose salaries push them over the cap, as Barcelona is attempting to do.
