Barça's latest defeat has led the coach to announce his delayed resignation and has generated another existential crisis regarding the club's chances of resurrection. This crisis involves both the sporting and economic aspects and the two are, obviously, closely related. What is Barça's problem? As an external observer in the world of football, we must highlight its indebtedness, a legacy of poor management and poor governance. Wanting the club to be competitive while carrying a large debt and unprofessional management seems like an impossible mission.
Maintaining the fiction that the club is governed by the members has allowed the governance of the institution to not be up to the task. Entities with poor corporate governance, whether for-profit or non-profit companies, suffer from two fundamental problems, well-known among organizational experts. The first is a poor selection of personnel at all levels that ends in poor performance at excessive cost, improvisation and repeated changes of managers.
Let's think about the inflated salaries, losing player transfers and ineffective hiring of the club in the 2017-21 period. Also in the frequent changes of coach, in which emotional factors often seem to outweigh those strictly of professional quality. Institutions that always look for “insiders” tend toward mediocrity. It is a known problem in family businesses. In this context, the attraction of personnel can suffer from the phenomenon of adverse selection, where the entity does not exactly attract the best professionals.
The second problem is that adequate incentives are not provided for managers and workers to work hard to make the company successful. These incentives can be both material and moral. You only have to compare the compensation of the successful and exemplary women's team with the men's team to understand that the latter's problem is not that the compensation is low.
How can corporate governance be reformed, management improved and debt reduced or eliminated? The crisis can derail the bet on resurrection made with the famous levers, which are nothing more than the sale of the club's assets, which would generate income in the future, to obtain income now and get by, hoping to produce a virtuous economic circle. sports.
The debt is heavy and the option of becoming a public limited company to attract capital may be put on the table sooner or later. I don't think it is the preferred option for the fans, nor for Catalan society in general, for Barça to end up in the hands of, say, the capital of the Middle East like some European clubs.
Now, the injection of external capital to pay off the debt can also come from a partial listing on the stock market, maintaining, for example, the Barça Foundation, which would represent the partners, a controlling stake, as in the case of Bayern Munich. It is Jaume Roures' proposal in this newspaper last January.
The advantage of this scheme is that the management of the club would have to be professionalized, given that it would be subject to the discipline and transparency regulations of the capital market. In this corporate governance scheme, the crucial point would be the structure and representativeness of the foundation, which would exercise effective control of the club. A delicate and not minor issue.
