RB Leipzig Update: Deadbeat Club Scrambling To Keep Players It Never Should Have Acquired

When F.C. Barcelona acquired Dani Olmo from RB Leipzig back in August, it did so despite clearly not being anywhere close to able to afford Olmo’s salary under La Liga’s Financial Fair Play rules, which regulate each club’s spending relative to its earnings and debts each season, and which Barcelona has been wrestling with for years as a result of years upon years of hideous mismanagement. Olmo wound up missing Barça’s first couple of 2024 La Liga matches because the club couldn’t register his salary with the league.

 

Good—or anyway, “good”—fortune came in the form of an Achilles tendon injury to trusty center back Andreas Christensen: In the event of an injury that will keep a given player out for four months or longer, La Liga rules permit a team to spend (and register) up to 80 percent of that player’s salary for the purpose of filling the hole in the squad. With Christensen out, Barça got the space it needed to register Olmo, plus young attacker Pau Víctor—but only through the end of December. The club would have until then to benefit from Olmo’s and Víctor’s services; if by then it hadn’t drummed up the additional income or savings it would need in order to extend their registrations through the end of the season, the registrations would expire on Jan. 1, rendering the two players unable to participate in La Liga matches and giving the club until the end of the January transfer window to get them re-registered.

Olmo’s contract, in particular, includes a clause that, if invoked, would make him a free agent if his registration isn’t completed by Jan. 1. He’d have no shortage of suitors in the January transfer window, if he prefers playing league soccer to, uh, being legally prohibited from it. Losing the club’s lone splashy acquisition of the 2024 summer window, for nothing, midway through the ensuing season, would be a cataclysmic embarrassment for Barça—to say nothing of however badly it damaged the team’s on-field prospects—and might very well end the tenures of club president Joan Laporta and sporting director Deco. Thus, even though Jan. 31 might be the hard deadline for getting the two players registered for the second half of the season, Jan. 1 is the effective deadline for avoiding the very real possibility of catastrophe.