According to Sport, La Liga have punished Almeria for providing misleading information regarding their sponsorship deals.
The report details how Almeria sought to artificially increase their income, by obtaining inflated sponsorship deals from Saudi Arabia. In this case, the deals they had signed added up to some €8m.
However, upon further inspection, La Liga have decided that the deal was worth €1m, a reduction in value of 87.5%. As a result of the change, this has significantly reduced the salary limit available to the club and in turn, explains the reduction in spending compared to previous years.
La Liga is supposedly keen to avoid a case like Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain occurring in Spain, where inflated sponsorship deals give the team financial muscle that others cannot compete with and has not been earned organically. Last year they changed the league rules in order to be able to pursue cases such as these.
