Barcelona drew much criticism for using their ‘economic levers’ this summer, in reality a sale of assets, however it has emerged that Real Madrid have made a similar deal.
Barcelona sold just under 50% of Barca Studios and 25% of their television rights for La Liga over the course of the next 25 years. The latter was a deal with American investment firm Sixth Street.
During Real Madrid’s General Assembly, as covered by Diario AS, Florentino Perez confirmed that Los Blancos had entered into a deal with the same company.
“In economic terms, the pandemic meant that we lost €200m in income. The 2019-20 season, thanks to a generous and drastic reduction [of salary] from everyone, we managed to close the results [of the accounts] in the black.”
“It was almost the same in 2020-21, given that, for example, we could only rely on a normal attendance at the stadium, already reduced for the stadium work, from the end of February. Recently we have arrived at an agreement for the next 20 years for €360m with Sixth Street and Legends, the best manager of stadiums in the world.”
As per Sport, who carried the information from Swiss Ramble, that deal was in exchange for 30% of the income from the new Santiago Bernabeu stadium. Should it not have been for that deal, Los Blancos would have made a loss a €127m loss for last season rather than a €13m profit.
Naturally this should be taken in context. Real Madrid will say that part of the deal with Sixth Street and Legends allows a company with expertise in managing the stadium and extracting the maximum income as a whole.
Meanwhile that is not the case for Barcelona’s TV rights deal and there is no doubt that their actions this summer were a result of their desire to widen their salary margin and recruitment options. However Joan Laporta can protest that in the case of Barca Studios, the Blaugrana will be able to improve their output from a subsidiary that was not making much money previously.