Real Madrid have announced the players, coaches and directors of their football and basketball teams have agreed a pay cut for the remainder of the season.
The announcement on Wednesday said that there were salary cuts of between 10 and 20 percent for those involved for the remainder of the 2019/20 campaign.
A club statement read: “The players and coaches of the football and basketball first teams of Real Madrid, led by their captains, together with the main directors of the different departments of the club have agreed to voluntarily reduce their remuneration for this year by between 10% and 20%, depending on the circumstances that may affect the closing of the current 2019/20 sports season.”
It follows a report in El Pais last week which claimed that such pay cuts for the club were inevitable despite their relatively strong financial position.
The report states that president Florentino Perez and club captain Sergio Ramos had previously discussed the situation and agreed that no salaries would be touched.
However, the club covers the salaries of 800 different individuals and the longer than anticipated absence of football means that the higher earners from their top two teams may need to reduce their income.
A number of other major Spanish clubs such as Barcelona, Atletico de Madrid and Espanyol have already announced huge wage cuts for their players, but Madrid’s economic strength is said to be much more flexible.
Los Blancos have a net debt of €27m but this pales in comparisons to that of Barcelona’s, which is said to be €217m.
However, unlike the other clubs it is said that Madrid do not think that applying an ERTE would have been suitable for the situation.
A number of La Liga clubs have announced they are activating an ERTE – Spain’s temporary redundancy scheme which is activated by the state of emergency within the country, with businesses losing access to their profits.
Madrid’s wage budget is less than 50% of their overall income while Barcelona’s is said to be closer to 80% – hence the difference in prioritising a wage reduction for staff.
The coronavirus outbreak has brought sport across the world to a halt with Spanish football suspended indefinitely – meaning that all clubs have no income from matchdays or, for the elite clubs, their museums.
Spain is now behind only Italy on the global scale for the most deaths due to the virus, with the nation now in a state of lockdown until 26 April at the earliest.
