Barcelona sold another 24.5% of Barcelona studios to Orpheus Media for €100 million in a bid to score all their new signings in Saturday’s La Liga match against Rayo Vallecano.
Barcelona have seven unregistered players ahead of the start of the first match of the season, but sources say they hope to resolve the situation now.
LaLiga will review the documents to see if everyone can now be signed, including the €45m signing of Robert Lewandowski.
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Barcelona may still need to cut their salary bill slightly to ensure everyone is available to face Rayo, but this could be done by adjusting Gerard Pique’s salary, with talks at an advanced stage.
This is the fourth leverage that Barcelona has attracted this summer. They previously sold 24.5% of Barca Studios to Socios.com and sold 25% of their local television rights to Sixth Street for 25 years in two separate deals worth more than €500 million.
Barcelona had hoped deals with Socios.com and Sixth Street would allow them to score all the players signed in the transfer window with LaLiga.
They were in talks with GDA Luma to sell another 24.5% of Barca Studios, but with talks stalled they had to look elsewhere this week.
Orpheus Media is owned by Catalan businessman Jaume Roures, who also helped Barcelona president Joan Laporta reach a guarantee to become club president in March 2021. The Catalan club has spent more than 150 million euros on Lewandowski, Ravenha and Jules Conde, while Frank Casey and Andreas Christensen arrived on free transfers.
Meanwhile, Sergi Roberto and Ousmane Dembele have signed two new contracts, but neither of the deals has been ratified by La Liga.
Barcelona dealt with a similar scenario last year, when Memphis Depay and Eric Garcia were signed up on the eve of the campaign after Pique agreed to a wage cut.
A league source confirmed to ESPN that the three levers pulled so far this summer would have allowed Barcelona to score some of those seven players, although who would have depended on the group and their number.
A club source said Barcelona always preferred to be able to score all players at the same time. There is optimism that it will now be possible, and in addition to the deal with Roures, talks are still underway with Pique and Sergio Busquets about further pay cuts to make room for salaries.
Barcelona must stick to the spending limit in La Liga. It was – €144m at the end of last season, the only negative cap in Spain, but after selling assets this summer, it should rise significantly for the new campaign.
Barca Studios is the club’s in-house production company but they also branch out, and Blaugrana He said the deal with Socios.com earlier this month would also accelerate the club’s audiovisual strategy, blockchain, NFT and Web3.
