This is one of the names you will hear about throughout this winter transfer window, which has been open for a few hours. Dani Olmo, Barça’s brilliant playmaker and European champion with Spain last summer, cannot be registered by his club to play the second half of the championship season and could find himself free from any contract less than six months after being snatched from Leipzig for 55 million euros, one of the biggest transfers of the year.
This would, obviously, be as much a sporting as a financial disaster for the Catalan giant, due to strict regulations from the Spanish League on the management of salaries by clubs. We’ll explain all that to you.
Why can’t Dani Olmo play for Barça anymore?
Already at the end of the summer, Dani Olmo narrowly managed to be included in the list of players registered by FC Barcelona to participate in national competitions. The long-term injury to defender Andreas Christensen had then in fact offered a sort of “joker” allowing the club, riddled with debt, to register Olmo and his salary in place of that of the Dane and to enter into the regulations. of Spanish Football on the financial regulation of clubs.
With Christensen returning from injury, the joker is gone and the problem at the start of the season carried over to this winter. Barça having in the meantime not given sufficient financial guarantees, La Liga does not authorize it to register Dani Olmo and the young striker Pau Victor, also concerned, because the addition of their emoluments would explode the imposed wage bill. to Lionel Messi’s former club.
A decision confirmed on December 27 by the city’s commercial court, although seized by the club, which “rejects the precautionary measures requested by FC Barcelona and therefore cannot register the player Dani Olmo for the rest of the season”. A decision then welcomed by La Liga, in the name of “equal conditions of competition rules” between its clubs.
From this Wednesday morning, January 1, La Liga did not delay in canceling the license of the two players and removing them from the list of players registered on its website, after the governing body of the competition announced Tuesday evening that the club had not “presented an alternative” allowing it to “register players” in accordance with its “economic control regulations”.
What is this regulation that is suffocating Barça?
We have to go back about ten years to understand what is happening to Barça. At a time when several clubs were threatening bankruptcy and financial fair play was worrying the biggest European clubs, the Spanish League adopted regulations in 2013-2014 aimed at regulating the finances of its clubs.
The idea is on paper quite simple: at the start of each season, La Liga calculates on the basis of the overall budget what it calls the limit of the “coste de plantilla” (the limit of the costs of the sports team), c that is to say the maximum amount that a club can spend to pay the salaries of its players, the coach, the staff, etc.
If the methodology of this calculation and the complexity of the regulations cause a lot of talk in Spain, this rule has the merit of forcing clubs to adjust their workforce in advance to this payroll and therefore of dissuading them from any excess of greed at the time of the summer transfer window. Unlike, for example, France, where the financial policeman called DNCG acts more downstream.
Barça, in the grip of great financial difficulties for several years, has already found itself in difficulty several times in the face of this regulation: in the summer of 2022, Jules Koundé, for example, waited more than a month to be registered after having was recruited by Sevilla FC. And at the end of last season, the Spanish media were already wondering how the club chaired by Joan Laporta could register its new coach, Hansi Flick…
What are the possible remedies?
The Barcelona commercial court having ruled in favor of La Liga, there are now fewer and fewer of them. Barça, which has already exhausted all legal avenues to extend Olmo’s registration until June 30, 2025, announced on Tuesday that it had asked the Spanish Football Federation for a new license for him and Pau Victor.
According to the Spanish media, this subterfuge would give FC Barcelona precious additional time to resolve its problems, even if Marca assures that if the request will be well studied by the RFEF, there is no chance that the Federation will contradict the League in this case. In this “desperate” situation, again according to Marca, the Federation should follow the very clear point 5 of article 141 of its general regulations: “Footballers whose license is canceled cannot, during the same season , obtain a license in the same team of the club to which they were already linked”.
Which would mean that even if Barça found a financial solution in the coming days to cover Olmo’s salary – the emergency sale of VIP places at its future renovated Camp Nou to investors is thus mentioned -, his registration could despite not everything is validated.
Will Olmo have to leave Barça free of any contract?
This is what could, theoretically, happen. Recruited this summer from Leipzig for 55 million euros, Dani Olmo, 26, is under contract until 2030 but a clause allows him to leave Barça if his club fails to register him in the league. It would also force Barça to pay him his full salary until the end of the said contract, a total cost estimated at 263 million euros according to the Catalan media Sport.
In addition, UEFA does not authorize him to play in the Champions League if he is not registered on the lists of national competitions. To summarize, if the situation never finds a solution, it would be up to Olmo to make a decision: either he leaves Barça for free, with a nice golden parachute and the possibility of signing for the club he wants, or he accepts to spend six months without playing to remain faithful to his training club.
On his social networks, Olmo posted photos of his New Year’s Eve party with the message “It’s time for 2025”, without seeming too worried about the situation. “Dani Olmo has decided to stay at Barcelona because he only wants to play for this club. He is not considering any other option,” his agent said a few days ago on Spanish radio RAC1.
A position likely to evolve in the coming days? Several European clubs, among the most exclusive, have already come forward for information according to the Spanish media.
