NAPKIN ECONOMICS:
Barcelona, PSG and the Ruining of Football
Or, the ego-fuelled mindset of the super-club.
It ends as it began – with a napkin. One was used to draw up his contract while he himself used another to wipe away his tears. The irony in all this, of course, is that Lionel Messi has unwittingly contributed to the ecosystem that made his departure inevitable.
That Barcelona is in crisis is not a revelation. Their debt, at the time of writing, is a staggering €1.35bn. Joan Laporta’s administration has taken out loans worth €80m and €550m, respectively, in order to manage the deficit but also to simply pay wages. Dismissing the effects of the pandemic, which account for €91m, Laporta has put the blame squarely at the feet of his predecessor, who signed off on the post-Neymar overspending.
Alarmingly, also, the cost limit imposed by La Liga on the club (which as with most La Liga rules requires a separate article to explain but is designed to reflect a club’s economic health and establish the team’s budget) has plummeted from €671m for the 2019-20 season to €160m for the upcoming year. With Messi, the club was at 115% of its allowed wage limit. Without him, and even with staggering cuts to veterans’ wages, Barcelona is still at 103%. Aguero, you poor sod.
All this is to say that Lionel Messi represents the unprecedented gorging of modern football. It is in the DNA of a super club like Barcelona to hook or crook its way to cling onto quality. As Messi’s star rose, so did his wages, and resultantly so did everyone else’s, with naïve disregard for financial health. Messi (and co.) will negate the debt at the season’s close. Except football is not always determined by which team is starrier. But no matter, tomorrow is a brighter day. Tomorrow, we will be better, stronger, faster, meaner, leaner and victorious. Why? Because the pursuit of ever higher quality via ever increasing expenditure will permanently put to sleep the prospect of underdog uprisings.
That Barcelona couldn’t envisage a tipping point is not a surprise. This is a malaise that has the top European clubs in a vice-like grip; one they are happy to be shackled by because the potential for success (profit) is infinite. PSG’s 2021 summer transfer window is the greatest any club has had. Ever. One must congratulate them for the audacity and nous to acquire Ramos, Messi, Donnarumma and Wijnaldum for free, to say nothing of the pittance they have paid for Hakimi.
But what is all this for? Their pursuit of profit has already conquered Ligue 1 (Lille is not an exception one expects again), turning it into a mind-numbing battle between PSG and the less fortunate. PSG crave the Champions League, yes, but they crave total dominance over it even more. The Parisians inflated the entire transfer market beyond belief when they signed Neymar, all in an attempt at complete European hegemony. Their acquisitions this summer, all but guaranteeing success, speak to the modern environment of football – that the more you consume, the more you will be rewarded. And if, for some strange reason, PSG’s stars cannot achieve European success, no aspersions will be cast on the team -- neither its tactics, nor its style of play, nor the chemistry between the players. No, the answer must always be more expenditure; Paul Pogba the increasingly ideal solution. That PSG are offering wages no one else can match is a discussion for another day.
Over at Manchester City, Pep Guardiola has spent upwards of £1b in his own pursuit of a third Champions League, and in doing so has cemented the despairing inevitability that the best players in the Premier League outside the so-called Top Six will inevitably land up at City. Look at Grealish. Look at Kane. Loyalty to boyhood ideals is nothing in the face of truly European success.[1]
This is nothing but napkin economics, which I propose asserts that the greater a club’s debt, the greater their expenditure.
The great incalculables of pride and ego will ensure that the so-called super clubs will always find a way to publicly inflate the market. Why? So that, despite the debt, no one else can afford the quality these super clubs can. And so, it is hoped that quality, however acquired, will breed success and, more importantly, prize money that can then counter that debt. Neymar and PSG. Grealish and City.[2]
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In the process, what is lost is the singular quality that defines sport, and particularly football, given the egalitarian, working class roots of the game – competition.[3] Or rather, the ability for a great variety of people to aspire to success. In a similar vein to how Guardiola’s tiki-taka has inspired an entire ecosystem that scoffs at any other style of play, it is now not a fear but a heartwrenching reality that wealth means success. End of. Leicester City, and perhaps Lille, were not the beginning of the underdog revolution, nor were they proofs that the underdog can become top dog. They were the end of football.
Either a super club will dominate endlessly, which is what the Premier League is increasingly becoming, or it will render itself morally and financially bankrupt. That Barcelona’s economic model is as flimsy as the napkin they used to sign Messi is ironic, but also indicative of the long-term viability of purchasing, purchasing and more purchasing. Clubs subscribing to napkin economics will collapse, if not today, then tomorrow. But if the semi-aborted Super League fiasco has taught us anything, it is that the fear of competition, and more importantly dented profit, makes napkin economics a pervasive permanence in football for the time being. It is up to the fan to instigate change that generates equality, rather than the increasingly despairing disparity of modern football’s hierarchy.
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[1] That this article has not mentioned Financial Fair Play at all is intentional. As both City and PSG have demonstrated, FFP is irrelevant, easily dodged and, most importantly, does not provide UEFA with any teeth to bite off exorbitant power. It is a fantastic washer of eyes and nothing more.
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[2] It would be remiss to not observe here that the reason these two clubs generate more cynicism from purists than, say, Manchester United and Liverpool, Real Madrid and Barcelona, is because of how their respective wealths were acquired; wealthy owners, however well-intentioned, do not have the same prestige as the money generated from trophies won with teams built from the ground up (originally, at least).
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[3] Thank you to commenter ‘RG’ for raising this point in the article ‘The Different Roads to Fantasy.’
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