Barcelona Fined $500K for ‘Intentionally’ Misleading About PE Money

FC Barcelona tried to solve its financial headaches by selling off some of its future earnings. It’s now going to have to pay a roughly $542,000 fine for how it accounted for that money.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport dismissed Barcelona’s latest appeal in a ruling published Friday. The fine was originally imposed by UEFA in July 2023, and the club lost its appeal to that body in November of that year.

Several factors, including strict LaLiga financial rules and the COVID-19 pandemic, left Barcelona in a sticky financial situation. As a quick-fix move to help dig itself out, the club made deals to sell 25% of its next 25 years of broadcasting revenue from domestic matches to Sixth Street, a U.S.-based investment firm.

UEFA said, and the CAS confirmed, that Barcelona “intentionally” misreported that money to overstate its “break-even results” by about $290 million.

The CAS also said UEFA gave Barcelona a chance to fix the error, which would’ve lowered the fine to about $86,000, but the club didn’t correct it.

The approximate $542,000 fine was “actually rather mild,” the CAS said. “The Panel finds that the intentional nature of the violation in conjunction with the major impact of an overstatement of Relevant Income in an amount of [about $290 million] in a single season make the infringement severe, justifying also a severe sanction,” the court ruled.

Barcelona has been trying to recover from a financial headache for almost a decade. Its spending on players rose just as the pandemic cut revenue, and left the club violating tight LaLiga rules around spending. As superstars like Lionel Messi and Gerard Piqué have left the club, and Barcelona has signed younger players, the wage bill has gone down. The sale to Sixth Street will hurt its revenue in the future, but it helped bring in about $330 million last year.