This summer has been a very boring one for European football transfers. Thanks to the pandemic, the clubs are facing financial difficulties and major signings have been avoided for the most part. The impact of the pandemic was so strong at the end of last season that clubs were forced to request the players a reduction in their salaries to give some financial room so the clubs can keep operating normally.
There are a few financially doped clubs such as Manchester City or PSG that are owned by oil states from the Middle East and have almost unlimited money to create awesome squads and even those clubs have avoided extremely expensive signings this summer.
However, when it comes to the big clubs in Europe, I believe there is one that has been suffering the most in the last few months and that club is Barcelona. Let's make a quick recapitulation regarding what has happened since football was restarted after the quarantine was over in Spain.
The Spanish League came back with empty stadiums and Barcelona was in the first position with Real Madrid a close second. In the remaining matches, Barcelona started to suffer a lot of ties while Real Madrid managed to obtain victory after victory ending with the League trophy going to Real Madrid.
Then in the Champions League, Barcelona was able to defeat Napoli but in the quarter-finals against the always powerful Bayern Munich, Barcelona suffered a historic defeat and humiliation by losing 2-8! This was the beginning of the nightmare for Barcelona, this was the worst possible way to end the season and if the final result was already bad enough, the lack of communication from the team leaders such as Messi with the fans was striking. Not even an apology for this horrible match, nothing. Total silence.
Barcelona decides to hire a different coach called Koeman and they quickly inform the name of several players that they don't want in the team, such as Rakitic, Vidal, and Suarez. This is a dumb decision because this decreases the value of those players in the market. Other clubs would be paying less money for those players because they know Barcelona wants to get rid of them. So far, only Rakitic has left the club and the transfer fee was extremely low.
Weeks later, Messi informs the club he wishes to leave Barcelona for free using a clause in the contract that allows him to do so, and the club's managers say he can't leave the club for free because that clause was only valid until June and Messi informed his decision in August. The only solution was for Messi and Barcelona to take this issue to the hand of judges but Messi declined to follow that path and instead decided to stay in Barcelona probably unhappily.
If all of this wasn't enough, today 2 new events happened. One was the confirmation that Setien, the coach from last season, hasn't been officially fired because Barcelona hasn't paid him the corresponding settlement, which is why the club has been unable to register Koeman as the official coach for the first LaLiga match. As of this moment, Barcelona's coach is still Setien and he just sued Barcelona to request the settlement according to the contract. You can see in the following official LaLiga's website that Setien appears as the coach instead of Koeman: https://www.laliga.com/clubes/fc-barcelona
The other important event is that a motion of censure appears to have collected the necessary signatures and this could eventually force Bartomeu to leave the presidency as soon as next November instead of in the next elections. This is something that I think has never happened in the history of the club. This could be a real disaster for Bartomeu because his own money could be at stake thanks to the losses caused by the pandemic. The economic exercise ended with around 98 million in losses and if he isn't able to fix this before leaving the presidency he might lose a ton of money, not just the club but his money as well. In comparison, Real Madrid finished their economic exercise with a profit of around 300k euros, which is not a lot of money for such a huge club but compared to the almost 100 million in losses for Barcelona it is very good.
So this is Barcelona's disastrous summer so far. It still hasn't ended and who knows what bad news might happen in the next following days.
I wonder if Bartomeu is the worst president in the history of Barcelona? What do you think?
Update: I just read that is Bartomeu is removed for the presidency due to the motion of censure then he wouldn't be responsible for this season's losses.