Dani Olmo and Pau Víctor can continue to play until the end of the season after the Spanish sports council (CSD) upheld Barcelona’s appeal against the league’s decision to unregister them because the club did not meet a 31 December deadline on financial controls.
The judgment comes a day after La Liga said Barcelona still did not comply with the salary limit set and that it would report the club’s former auditors after €100m effectively disappeared from their accounts.
The CSD, which in January passed an injunction releasing Olmo and Víctor to play pending a three-month investigation, delivered its judgment on Thursday. The government body ruled that the joint league-federation commission that had announced that the players could not be registered lacks the jurisdiction to rule on their case and that they had incorrectly denied the players a licence, thus “annulling the RFEF-Liga agreement”. Olmo and Víctor faced having their registration removed with immediate effect, but can now continue until 30 June, after which Barcelona will again have to meet financial fair play limits to register them for next season.
Barcelona’s ability to register them in the next window was, though, again cast in doubt on Wednesday when the league alleged that, contrary to what had been believed in January, Barcelona have not reached what is known as 1:1 where a club operates normally, spending a euro for every euro of income. The league said that the income from a €100m deal from two unnamed investors to buy VIP boxes at the new Camp Nou, which allowed them meet the threshold in January, does not now appear in the club’s profit and loss statement.
With time running out Barcelona had employed unnamed auditors on 31 December– on Thursday reported by Cadena Ser to be a Catalan company called Abauding – which provided the certificate that accredited the income. That firm took over from the previous auditors Grant Thornton and was then replaced by Crowe Auditores. Crowe prepared the club’s accounts that were delivered to the league after the close of the transfer window. According to the league, those audited accounts do not now include the €100m deal.
“Neither on 31 December, nor on 3 January nor today do Barcelona have the margin to comply with financial fair play,” a La Liga statement said. It also said it had asked the CSD to investigate fully and that it would report the auditors who certified that income to the Institute of Accounting and Accounts Auditing (ICAC). The Barcelona president, Joan Laporta, claimed that the league’s announcement was part of a campaign against his club. “That they come out with controversies like this is not chance,” he said. “It’s another attempt to destabilise us.”
La Liga announced on 31 December that Barcelona had missed the deadline to comply with financial controls. Still over their €426m salary limit, that meant that the temporary registrations given to Olmo and Víctor in August ran out and the pair were removed from the squad.
Barcelona said that a late €100m deal to sell VIP boxes at the new Camp Nou to Middle Eastern investors had been completed. The club’s vice-president Elena Fort said she did not know who the two companies were that had bought the package. Laporta subsequently said there was one Qatari company and another from Saudi Arabia but he did not name them.
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Although the league ratified that income on 3 January based on an auditor’s certificate, increasing the limit to €463m, it said that the necessary documentation had not been received in time to extend the registration of Olmo and Víctor. Federation (RFEF) rules prevent a club registering a player twice in one season, denying them the opportunity to effectively re-sign the two players. A statement from the Comisión de Seguimiento del Convenio de Coordinación RFEF-LaLiga, the body that oversees the relationship between the league and federation, then announced that they could not be included in the squad.
Barcelona had previously failed in two legal challenges raised against the ruling but succeeded in convincing the CSD to apply a cautelar, essentially an injunction suspending the decision pending an investigation. The CSD said then that it did so in order to avoid irreparable damage to the players and to Spanish football. Barcelona provided a 60-page document defending the players’ right to work and alleging that the Commission does not have the competence to rule in this case. On Thursday the CSD upheld that argument, rejecting La Liga and the RFEF’s argument that the Commission had only communicated decisions made by the relevant bodies at both institutions.
The CSD insisted that its ruling did not bring into question the legitimacy of the salary limit rules at La Liga, although some clubs are concerned that the structure may now have been severely undermined. Nor did the ruling make any mention of the €100m payment that La Liga is now questioning; those are effectively two different, if related issues. Barcelona have not responded formally to La Liga’s statement.
