Barcelona stars furious at Laporta wage cut claims
Suraj Radia
- 10 Oct 2022 20:51 BST
- 3 min read
Barcelona’s senior stars are reportedly furious after president Joan Laporta publicly criticised them for not taking pay cuts in order to help the club’s financial position.
Laporta was speaking at the Barca’s Member’s Assembly and detailed the financial situation that was affecting the club, telling attendees that they did everything to lower their wage bill.
It is believed that members of the board were made to ‘guarantee’ €10 million from the budget in order to register new signing Jules Kounde after players allegedly refused pay cuts.
“We have tried with several players and not only has it not come out but we have had to guarantee the €10m that [we] were missing,” Laporta said.
“If there had been reductions of some players, that guarantee should not have been made, we accepted it with sportsmanship.”
The comments were implicitly targeting the likes of Frenkie de Jong and Gerard Pique, both of whom had agreed previous pay cuts and are still owed deferred wages, while others such as Jordi Alba have claimed that Barca have never asked him to lower his salary.
According to a report by Spanish outlet Cope, the admission is believed to have angered and shocked senior members of the dressing room, with the belief that the timing was poor given the pivotal upcoming fixtures against Inter and Real Madrid.
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Barca are joint-top of La Liga ahead of El Clasico in their next league game, while they face a difficult situation to get out of their Champions League group as they sit third with three points from their first three matches.
Sporting director Mateu Alemany echoed the words of Laporta, saying: “These players are impossible to transfer. They are wages out of market, the aim is that they disappear.”
🎙️| Laporta: “We are aware that the Economic Levers are an exceptional situation that is activated in emergency times, but at the same time we are not a club belonging to a country or a billionaire man behind us, we do not have and do not want that at the moment.“ #fcblive
— BarçaTimes (@BarcaTimes) October 9, 2022
The club spent more than €200m on players this summer despite their financial constraints, with the majority of the outlay coming from a host of ‘economic levers’ activated by Barca, such as selling off a portion of their future TV revenue.
There was also an attempt to force De Jong out of the club after the midfielder received an offer from Manchester United, with the 25-year-old told he could either take a wage cut or leave, as well as threatened with legal action.
