21st October 2025
October 21 – Barcelona President Joan Laporta claims the club came close to being banned from the UEFA Champions League due to repeated breaches of Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations, before being fined €15 million instead.
Laporta admitted that the threat of suspension forced intense, last-minute negotiations with UEFA. After the former president Josep Maria Bartomeu left the club under a cloud with debt mounting, the club found itself handcuffed by La Liga’s rigid spending rules. To keep the ball rolling, the highly controversial use of “financial levers” was put into play, basically selling future assets for immediate cash.
“UEFA wanted to punish us by not allowing us to play in the next Champions League,” Laporta revealed during the club’s General Assembly. “And the fact that Barcelona isn’t a limited company and can’t increase its capital was one of the arguments we used to get UEFA to reduce the fine for breaching financial fair play from 60 million to 15 million. They also wanted to sanction us by not allowing us to play in the next Champions League.”
Laporta was quick to say that those “levers” were a lifeline, not a loophole. “The levers were intended to alleviate the situation we found ourselves in four and a half years ago,” he explained. “Strictly speaking, leverage is not a capital increase. It is simply a transfer of assets for a specific period of time, which are then recovered.”
“In exchange, you receive a certain amount of money,” he continued. “We transferred 25% of our television rights to a fund, which brought us €600 million… This allowed us to save the club.”
Barcelona dodged UEFA’s harshest penalties this time, but the question of what the Champions League would look like without one of its most iconic institutions lingers.
If Barça, with all their history, were barred from the Champions League, it wouldn’t just be a punishment for the club; it would send a warning to other clubs that no-one is too big to escape expulsion.