NEWCASTLE UNITED V FC BARCELONA - AN ALTERNATIVE OWNERSHIP MODEL?

Written by John Hird

Newcastle United’s opening opponents of the Champion's League are FC Barcelona. Barça has a glittering history of achievements and records, including 28 La Liga titles, a record 32 Copa del Rey titles, and a record 14 Spanish Super Cups. Internationally, the club has won five UEFA Champions Leagues, four UEFA Cup Winners' Cups, and three FIFA Club World Cups. Barcelona holds the distinction of being the first Spanish team to achieve the continental "treble" (La Liga, Copa del Rey, and Champions League) and has secured it twice. FC Barcelona has also contributed immensely to world footballing culture, from the development of coaching maestros such as Johan Cruyff and Pep Guardiola to the evolution of the famous 'tiki taka' style of possession football. Despite this record they are ‘only’ the second most successful club in La Liga, behind Real Madrid. Today, they are also the second most-supported club on the planet but who owns FC Barcelona?

‘Socio’ owned football clubs

What many fans outside of the Spanish state may not know is that FC Barcelona and Real Madrid are not owned by a foreign state, bloody dictatorship or multinational hedge fund. Both clubs operate under a fan ownership model that is reasonably common in Spain but completely unheard of at the top level of English football.

FC Barcelona, Real Madrid, our future opponents Athletic Club, and Osasuna — are all owned by groups of supporters called 'socios'.

How does the ‘socio’ ownership model work?

In parallel with the launch of the Premier League in 1992, from the start of the 1992/93 La Liga season, clubs were required to be privately owned as per the Sports Law Ley 10/1990 del Deporte. There was, however, an exception to the new rule: if clubs could prove that they were profitable for five consecutive seasons from 1985 to 1990, they were permitted to operate as member-owned non-profit sports associations. Barcelona, Real Madrid, Athletic Club, and Osasuna all qualified and ever since they have remained as fan-owned enterprises or 'socios'.

The ‘socio’ model works as follows: club members, aka socios, will pay an annual subscription fee in exchange for voting rights in elections for the club's president and board of directors.

Barcelona has over 150,000 ‘socios’, making it the largest fan-owned club in Spain. An interesting contrast between Barça and Man City is that even though the Catalan club has a much wider fanbase, City’s revenue is much higher at €838 million (second to Real Madrid at €1.05 billion). FC Barcelona have a revenue of €760m in 2025.

There are some limitations to the ‘socio’ ownership model. Being a ‘socio’ ensures a sense of democracy and allows supporters to have a direct role in the running of their club (while preventing profit-driven businesspeople with no interest in the health and sustainability of the club from taking over), there is however a limit to the fans' power.

Ultimately, their job is to elect a president and board of directors; after they've done this, all the responsibility rests with those elected officials. Even if the model only provides the most basic level of fan democracy at least the ‘socios’ get to influence the general direction and policy of the club. It’s hard to imagine Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Mohammed bin Salman allowing the fans of Man City and Newcastle to vote them and their cronies out!


Financial Problems

The intense historical and ever present rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona means that spending often gets out of hand and causes problems.  

In recent years Barça and Real Madrid have spent generously on wages and transfer fees, but it's not all about just one person or a state pumping tons of money into the club so problems do arise in a cyclical fashion.

In the past few years Laporta, the President of Barcelona, has had to deal with a monstrous debt of €1.1 billion, the largest in world football, product in part of the mismanagement of the previous board of directors, partly due to losses left by the pandemic and to a large extent due to the enormous salaries of former stars such as Messi and Neymar.

Barcelona’s debt has been reduced, but at the same time Laporta's board has had to implement some painful solutions, such as the so-called "levers" sale of the club's assets to be able to make new signings and finance the flagship project, the renovation of the ‘Spotify’ Camp Nou, the club’'s stadium.

Incredibly, FC Barcelona had losses of €91 million in the 2023-2024 financial year.

They were forced to take a series of money saving exercises. They first sold 10% and then 15% of their television rights income for the next 25 years to an American investment fund that is part of the corporate structure of the NBA San Antonio Spurs.

A salary cap was imposed on Barça by La Liga due to the losses they incurred over the last few years and they have about €300 million less to spend on salaries than Real Madrid.

To calculate the payroll, non-sports expenses (debts, administrative and maintenance costs of facilities) must be subtracted from total income (television rights, ticketing, sponsorship agreements, commercial licenses, prizes and sale of players).

Thankfully for them the club has always invested well in youth development so academy players and low cost players mean they won La Liga last year despite their financial crisis. Lamine Yamal and Pedri have renewed contracts this year, and naturally, after the extraordinary seasons of both, their salaries are now much higher and so the cyclical financial pressures will probably begin again.

However, from September the ‘new’ Camp Nou will be available, and so it is estimated that between the revenues from ticketing and other uses of the facility, in addition to the reduction of staff costs, Barcelona could have revenues of the order of 1.1 billion dollars in fiscal year 2027.


Why no state owned clubs in La Liga?

Due to historical, sporting, cultural and political factors it would be difficult or nearly impossible for a Gulf state or US multinational to take over the ‘Big Two’ football clubs in La Liga. Anyway, fans of other clubs would say that Real Madrid and FC Barcelona are already state owned given the financial help they have been given over the decades by the Spanish state and Catalonia!

It is also doubtful that Athletic or Osasuna fans would allow their clubs to be taken over by such entities, mainly for ideological and political reasons. As Athletic Bilbao fan and journalist Rayco Sánchez said in an interview with NUFCFAS: “The clubs and the fan bases are toys in the hands of these kinds of ownerships (nation state owners). They think they could modify and change anything, even the history of the clubs, like they do in the NBA,  by changing the location of the franchises.”

“I can’t imagine this situation in Athletic, we have strong convictions, and we prefer to die like we are instead of winning trophies without our moral rules. Besides, nowadays we have a young fanbase who are actively working for the community and  are open minded with values of freedom and I hope we will keep fighting for our model of ownership.”


The Premier League effect

Concentrating financial power in an elite group of a few clubs gives them unfair advantages and debases fair competition, which after all should be the lifeblood of a sport. The Punch and Judy rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona is of a different nature to the problems we face in the Premier League. 

Fans in England who opposed the setting up of the Premier League in 1992 called it a swindle and labelled it as an attempt of the ‘Big Clubs’, especially Manchester United to grab the lion’s share of TV money. This was borne out when Manchester United went on to win 13 Premier League titles in 21 seasons. In fact the prediction that football success would be confined to a small elite group of clubs has been borne out with only 7 different teams having won the Premier League in its 33 years of existence. There had been 7 different League Champions in just the last 18 years of the old 1st Division and 23 winners in total, including Newcastle United (4) and unfortunately Sunderland (6) albeit over a longer period of time.

In recent years the Premier League has allowed the new phenomenon of state owned Manchester City who have used the vast wealth of the Gulf dictatorship, both legally and illegally to dominate the game. Prior to the Premier League Manchester City had won 2 league titles. Since 2011 they have won 8.   

Clearly the Premier League has restricted competition and concentrated power in the hands of fewer richer clubs. It used to be a ‘Big 4’ and now it’s a ‘Big 6’. Many Newcastle fans criticise the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability Regulations (PSR),and demand they be relaxed so we can augment the ‘Big 6’. But is this really the way forward for football?

As much as we criticise the multinational hedge funds which own other Premier League clubs, a state owned football club is on a qualitatively different level.  


State owned Manchester City break all the rules

As NUFCFAS has pointed out previously, the Gulf dictatorship which owns Manchester City does not follow the rules. 

“It should be of no surprise to football fans that a company controlled by a dictatorship, which is prepared to break all international and UK labour laws by tearing up the contracts of workers, also ignores the FFP rules of the Premier League…”

Despite the recent ruling on Associated party transaction rules (APT), Manchester City are still facing 115 charges of financial irregularity.

The 115 charges have been broken down to five different categories.

• 54x Failure to provide accurate financial information 2009-10 to 2017-18.

• 14x Failure to provide accurate details for player and manager payments from 2009-10 to 2017-18.

• 5x Failure to comply with Uefa's rules including Financial Fair Play (FFP) 2013-14 to 2017-18.

• 7x Breaching Premier League's PSR rules 2015-16 to 2017-18.

• 35x Failure to co-operate with Premier League investigations December 2018 - Feb 2023.

Source - BBC News

The charge list is massive and football fans can rightly say that the club’s recent successes have been achieved fraudulently and unfairly. If, as looks likely, they are found guilty of some or most of the charges, then Manchester City should be stripped of their titles.

The question for Newcastle United fans is: Do we want to join that kind of  company? The Gulf dictatorship which owns our club is richer than the owners of Manchester City. Do we want all financial fair play rules removed and open up the already unfair Premier League to Mohammed bin Salman to buy and cheat his way to ‘success’ for our club or maybe we should start looking at alternative ownership models?

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