A month ago, Bayern Munich manager Julian Nagelsmann said what everyone who doesn't own a vintage Seydou Keita jersey was thinking: "The only club that has no money, but buys every player they want. I do not know how. It's kind of crazy."
This was after Barcelona acquired 33-year-old Robert Lewandowski, scorer of 35 goals for Nagelsmann in the Bundesliga last season, for $49.5 million. Raphinha had already arrived from Leeds for $63.8m. It seemed "crazy" then … and then they spent another $55m on Sevilla defender Jules Kounde. They've also signed free agents Andreas Christensen from Chelsea and Franck Kessie from AC Milan, as well as resigning both Sergi Roberto and Ousmane Dembele once their previous contracts expired at the end of June. Chelsea's Marcos Alonso is expected to join soon, and the club is reportedly still interested in Manchester City's Bernardo Silva. The latter seems like a fantasy too far, but well, so did everything else until it all happened.
The how of all this — a club with over a billion dollars in debt and described as "clinically dead" by president Joan Laporta last season suddenly spending more on transfer fees than anyone else in the world — has been hashed out by many of our writers already this summer. In a word, which you must be sick of by now: levers. They've sold off a quarter of their future domestic broadcast revenue and a quarter of their in-house production company for a short-term cash infusion north of $600 million. More levers are being pulled, too, with news early on Friday — just 30 hours or so before their season opener, a home date with Rayo Vallecano — that the club was selling more in order to be able to register its signings.
Instead, I want to focus on a different question: why? Why is this once-great club selling off its future for a still-uncertain present? Can this really be as obviously short-sighted as it seems?
Laporta will make you think that they had to do this, that there was no choice but to totally revamp the squad with hundreds of millions of dollars of loans put toward a massive transfer outlay. However, that's just not true.
Barcelona were better than you think
Focus on a single game or a single season, and results will drive you mad. The outcome of a match has only a vague connection to who the better team is. Favorites win less often in European soccer than they do in any of the major American sports; luck plays an outsize role in a sport with so few shot attempts and even fewer goals. Countless studies have found that results don't tell you all that much other than the obvious: who won, lost or drew. Instead, plenty of other metrics — goal differential, shot differential, expected-goal differential — provide way more predictive power than point totals do.
When you chase results, you're chasing the past: something that happened, but that doesn't tell you all that much about what's going to happen.
Last season, Barcelona's results weren't great, but they really weren't that bad, either. They finished second in LaLiga, 13 points behind Real Madrid. That's an unforgivable gap to some; it's also the 11th-best points-per-game rate in Europe last year behind only Madrid, the Premier League's top three, Serie A's top three, the Bundesliga's top two and Paris Saint-Germain. In short, this was still a top-15 team in Europe.