‘Barcelona will not just defend itself, we will go on the attack’ – those were the words of President Joan Laporta in a recent video published on club social media. Laporta has maintained that Barcelona are innocent in El Caso Negreira, and any attempts to say otherwise will be met with a firm response.
One of the concerns for Barcelona was that while La Liga have ruled out sporting sanctions, UEFA might expel them from European competition. The governing European football body opened an investigation into the matter last week and are not bound by the same statute of limitations. Barcelona have said they will cooperate with their investigation.
Laporta is willing to follow through on his words though, as per MD. The club estimate that their total losses from not playing in the Champions League would be around €100m per season, without taking into account the impact on sponsorship deals. Barcelona are supposedly willing to sue UEFA for that amount should they dole out punishment before the case is resolved in the Spanish courts.
UEFA’s own statutes say that they cannot go against active legal process and thus would have to wait until the Spanish courts were finished with the matter.
It is not clear whether UEFA were planning to hand out punishment ahead of that time at any rate, but it is a legal avenue that gives Barcelona some breathing room. The Spanish legal process is likely to some time, potentially years, to resolve the matter, and so postponing any UEFA punishment for that time should allow Barcelona to get their affairs more together, whereas financially a UEFA expulsion would be ruinous this summer.
