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Javier Tebas, has, for a long time, seen La Liga more as a content provider than as simply an organizational mechanism for professional football in the country of Spain. With this in mind, he has created a new company that will handle the business end of La Liga, and has sold 10% of that company for 2.7 billion worth of investment. You can read more details on the deal in Dermot Corrigan’s piece for The Athletic.
Pending ratification, all 42 La Liga teams in the top two tiers of Spanish football should see an immediate financial boost, but no one seems to know what the money is actually for. Will this allow Real Madrid to buy Mbappe? Will Barcelona actually be able to pay Messi and register the players they signed to contracts? According to Corrigan, the answer to both of those things is ‘no’. This deal, allegedly, is geared more towards building the ‘infrastructure’ of clubs and the league as a whole.
Marca, naturally, see it differently. According to them, if this deal goes through you can more or less go ahead and plan on facing Mbappe and Messi in the league next season:
Ojo porque Barcelona y Real Madrid, por ejemplo, recibirían de forma inmediata casi 275 millones: solución de golpe a la renovación de Messi , el fichaje de (digamos) Mbappé o para aliviar la financiación del nuevo Bernabéu https://t.co/dgJgRpeAkM Por @sergiofmarca
— MARCA (@marca) August 4, 2021
Regardless, this deal is a huge financial boost to Spanish football as a whole. It won’t eradicate the deficit between La Liga and the Premier League, but that combined with the decade long ESPN deal announced this year make our league easily the second strongest league financially in the world.
From Villarreal’s perspective, it doesn’t actually matter much what the money is earmarked for. Club infrastructure is a massive strength for Villarreal, and running the club in a self-sustaining way while producing elite talent is something we are already doing. If this influx of cash replaces what we are already spending on our strong infrastructure, then the money we are spending there becomes free for other purposes like transfers regardless. This is one of the benefits of pulling for a well run football club instead of a massive corporation that happens to have a football team. We don’t need the money to get us out of a mess, we can simply move from strength to strength.