BARCELONA
Barcelona will continue paying Lionel Messi’s salary through 2025
He may be on his way to Inter Miami, but the Argentinian star still has unpaid earnings from his time at Camp Nou.
Barcelona president Joan Laporta has confirmed that Lionel Messi is still being paid by the Catalan club, despite having left Camp Nou two years ago.
Laporta revealed the outstanding payments to Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia. Messi left the club in 2021 after the expiration of his previous contract, which was worth up to €138million per year once potential bonuses were included.
In an interview published on Monday, Laporta confirmed for the first time that the club still had outstanding debts owed to their all-time record scorer.
“(Do) we owe any money to Messi? The only thing we owe are the salary deferrals that were agreed with the previous board of the club,” Laporta admitted.
“This is producing pending payments that will come to an end in 2025. We are paying everything religiously.”
Related news
Messi was one of a number of high-earners who agreed to defer their payments to ease the financial pressures on the club. However for the Argentine to still be receiving deferred payments for two years to come, two years after leaving the club, is a mark of Barcelona’s financial woes.
How much are Lionel Messi’s Barcelona payments?
This revelation came as a surprise to many involved in Spanish football. Earlier this year Laporta suggested to Cadena SER, a popular Spanish radio station, that the situation was resolved.
At the time the Barça president said: “We don’t have anything pending [with Messi]. Everything is agreed with him.”
It is no known how much the outstanding payments could be, but the deferral was agreed when Messi had only 18 months left on his contract.
However Messi’s salary was far from the only payment deferred by the club during the covid-19 pandemic. In November 2020 Barcelona released a club statement confirming that the squad had agreed to deferrals that would save the club up to €172 million.
“The club’s and the players’ representatives have reached an agreement in principle that allows an adjustment to salaries for the current season for an amount of €122m fixed remuneration,” the statement read.
“Added to that is the deferral for up to three years of variable remuneration from this season, budgeted at an approximate figure of €50m.”
With such vast amounts of unpaid salaries still on the books, Barcelona are once again walking a financial tightrope this summer.