This summer, La Liga clubs registered a total of 90 signings. But if La Liga started tonight, there would only be 39 of those 90 players who could play with their new club! More than half of the players who landed in a new Spanish team should thus attend the meeting of their new employer from the stands. And for good reason, 51 players have not yet been registered by the clubs with La Liga. Blame it on this very strict financial fair play imposed by the Spanish championship – with a supervised payroll – which requires clubs to have a perfect financial balance in order to be able to register the contracts of new players.
Money problem? Not necessarily. At least not in most cases. “Recruiting is easy, what is difficult is registering players”says a sports director of La Liga to the newspaper brand. Concretely, it is not necessarily a problem of liquidity, but a problem of balance: the clubs cannot spend more of what they earn. That is to say that even if they have large sums available in their accounts, they must still remain in a positive income-expenditure balance.
Stars involved
Among the players affected by this problem, we find in particular the 3 recruits of FC Barcelona: Oriol Romeu, İlkay Gündoğan and Íñigo Martínez. The Catalans, who currently only have 13 players available for the start of the championship, are not the only ones concerned. Betis, for example, still cannot register its recruits like Marc Roca, Hector Bellerin or Isco, while Real Sociedad, which is nevertheless a management model, cannot yet register André Silva with La Liga.
Among the good students, we find Real Madrid or Villarreal, who were able to register all their new faces. But this situation is necessarily worrying, and everything indicates that many clubs will have to do without their recruits for this first day of La Liga. In Spain, these measures are arousing quite fierce criticism of Javier Tebas, even if others believe that in the medium term, this policy of voluntary financial austerity will pay off in the medium term…
