From Barcelona to Bayern Munich, Europe's richest clubs propose salary cuts to balance precarious finances

Football is in hibernation and so are the industries that feed off it, causing major financial hits for some of the biggest clubs

The empty entrance to Barcelona's Camp Nou stadium. AFP

A woman in a face mask walks past Barcelona's Camp Nou stadium. EPA

View of the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona. EPA

Barcelona's Camp Nou stadium. Bloomberg

Pedestrians pass Barcelona's Camp Nou stadium. Bloomberg

The Camp Nou stadium, home to FC Barcelona. Bloomberg

Empty seats and a trophy sit inside the Camp Nou stadium. Bloomberg

A visitor on the Barcelona FC tour takes a selfie inside the Camp Nou stadium before the coronavirus gripped Spain. Reuters

A visitor on the Barcelona FC tour inside the Camp Nou stadium before the coronavirus gripped Spain. Reuters

A visitor on the Barcelona FC tour inside the Camp Nou stadium before the coronavirus gripped Spain. Reuters

The gates are barred, the campus all but empty around Camp Nou. It is not something Barcelona Football Club are used to. Match nights can draw 90,000, but it is the days in between that those in charge of the club’s treasury value almost as much. More than a million and a half visitors come every year to the Barca museum, immediately opposite the stadium.

Football is in hibernation, for an unspecified period, and so are the industries that feed off it. Spain's state of emergency in the face of coronavirus, with the country rapidly becoming the focus of the pandemic, means every expedition out of the house needs a specific justification. Tourism is all but extinguished.

Museums are no-go zones. The one that celebrates Barcelona FC, with its slick virtual reality experiences alongside a carefully curated reverence for the club’s storied past, has had no takers for two weeks. That dents the club’s finances as badly as the fact nobody is buying tickets to watch Lionel Messi and company.

There’s more. Far fewer parents than usual have been committing their sons and daughters to Barcelona’s popular and lucrative training schools, a big business for a club that cultivates, from first team to academy, the idea that Barca have a uniquely elegant and winning way of teaching the game. Merchandise sales are dropping, too, with retail outlets closed, shoppers prioritising necessities not luxury items.

All of which led Barcelona, who at the beginning of this year were placed at the top of Deloitte's global ranking of football clubs on the basis of revenue - US$864m (Dh3.17 billion) in 2018-19 according to Deloitte - to last week propose a radical short-, perhaps medium-term, salary cut to their most valuable employees: the players.

While football was in lockdown, they suggested, wages should be paid at only 30 per cent of the normal rate. The Barca players were on Thursday still contemplating their response.

Barcelona, for all the precarious balance they maintain between vast borrowings and outgoings and a highly-developed web of income streams, are the lucky ones. Many sporting institutions and hundreds of thousands of people whose living depends on sport will be left without a clear working future at all as a result of the Covid-19 crisis.

At the top and at the foot of the football pyramid, a new economic reality is ahead, signposted more and more boldly as the dates in the calendar around financial planning is hooked fall away: not only the fixtures that bring in broadcast riches and full corporate boxes, but the big buying and selling.

The summer transfer window cannot open as usual in July when the likelihood - or at least the optimistic forecast - is that domestic leagues might be playing out their postponed fixtures into that month and possibly beyond.

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Footballers and clubs pledge aid to fight coronavirus

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"We will probably see a new football landscape," Uli Hoeness, who last year stepped down from the presidency of Bayern Munich after the best part of 40 years in executive positions at the club, told Kicker magazine. "You cannot say anything for certain at the moment, but I don't see €100m transfer fees again in the immediate future, and player contracts are not going to keep rising like they have been."

Bayern, a club Hoeness helped push to a position of unprecedented dominance in the Bundesliga - they are chasing an eighth successive title - have already agreed with their players that, until matches return to the calendar, salaries will be paid with a 20 per cent cut.

And Barcelona can be quite sure that nobody will be calling them from Bayern to offer €100m (Dh376m)-plus for Philippe Coutinho, the midfielder the German champions have had on loan from Barca since last August, and whose transfer to Barcelona in early 2018 was worth up to €150m to Liverpool, the selling club.

Chief executives in the Premier League, collectively the wealthiest elite division in the sport, will next week meet, via videolink, to discuss the issue of salary cuts. Paris Saint-Germain, far and away France’s richest club, are meanwhile preparing to put their formula for reducing wages to their players.

Negotiations will be tetchy, but footballers' trade unions across Europe acknowledge the privileged top band of their membership have an obligation to make income sacrifices, beyond the noble, applauded donations to health services some individuals, Messi among them, have made. And they know the players must cede some of their privileges with no clarity about how long sport's closedown will last.