Revealed: the reason why Dani Olmo was cleared to play for Barcelona

FC Barcelona players Dani Olmo and Pau Víctor have been given the green light to play for the club after a Spanish court ruled against the decision from LaLiga and the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) to not allow them to be re-registered.

It’s been a long and complicated story, but it seems that Barcelona have found a way.

How did this all begin?

Barcelona signed Olmo in the summer and initially spread out the fee over the duration of his deal: a five-year contract. This allowed the club to justify the signing and fit in into the Financial Fair Play regulations.

However, LaLiga did not ratify the deal and allow the attacker to be registered as an active playing member of the squad as the numbers did not fit within their salary limit rules, which are directly related to the money that comes into the club. The more money you make, the more you can spend. Barcelona’s recent financial problems meant that their limits were low, too low for LaLiga to authorise such a big deal.

As such, Olmo was a Barça employee, but couldn’t play.

This is where an injury to Andreas Christensen ‘came in handy’ for Barcelona. As Olmo sat there waiting for the club to find more money, the Danish defender was ruled out for the long term, leaving a gap, financially, in Barcelona’s squad that they moved to quickly fill. Olmo was subsequently allowed to be registered as an active player in the side.

Why can Dani Olmo now play for Barcelona?

But the solution was always going to be short term, and dear reader you’re right for asking: after 6 months, what happened when Christensen came back in December? Simple: Olmo would be de-registered and removed from the Barcelona books as an active player on January 1.

Panicked, the club quickly scrambled to find the necessary financial backing to make enough wiggle room in their salary limits, which they did by securing a deal with Nike and saying they would use the Ter Stegen injury for the next 6 months in the same way as the Christensen one in the summer - but with LaLiga now alert to the situation, it was not enough, and the December 31 deadline came and went.

Despite this, Barcelona still believed that they were in the right as the documentation had been presented, and moved to sell future VIP boxes in the new Camp Nou, which did indeed push them over then line financially. But it all appeared in vain: they were still past the deadline.

And so, we woke up on January 1 2025 and just like magic, both Dani Olmo and Pau Víctor were no longer Barcelona players.

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And so, the club in a ‘normal’ financial position and now in the transfer window, moved to re-register Olmo, but there was another roadblock.

LaLiga rules say that a club cannot register the same player twice in one season. As a result, even with the deals in place, Olmo was out.

A clause in his contract at the time of signing said that were he to be de-registered (as the player and his agent clearly knew this whole mess was a possibility), during the season, he would be allowed to leave for free in the winter window and receive all of his 5-year deal up front. This left the player in a strong, albeit frustrating position.

In the meantime, after being approached by Barcelona ,the Spanish Federation (RFEF), along with LaLiga, issued a joint statement in which they declared that Dani Olmo and Pau Víctor would not be able to be re-registered as the law literally says a player cannot be re-registered to the same club twice in one season.

But you think that spotted Barcelona from throwing things at the wall? Something had to stick eventually, right?

And it did. After taking it to court, Spain’s Consejo Superior de Deportes (CSD) decided that the two players could form part of the squad once again as the club had indeed handed in all the necessary paperwork on time. As well as that the law says “a player can only be registered to a single club without being de-registered and re-registered by the club“.

Barcelona say it was not “the club” who de-registered Olmo and Pau Víctor, but LaLiga. It seems that the CSD agree with them, and the pair can now play.

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