Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has expressed his bemusement at the current financial situation at Barcelona.
Few clubs were taken to the financial brink during the pandemic like the Catalan giants, with current president Joan Laporta, who returned to the post for a second time last year, stating that the club was "clinically dead" when he took it on from Josep Maria Bartomeu's tenure.
The La Liga club had debts in excess of £1bn, with a significant chunk of that due in the short term, and had to call on players to take wage cuts and defer salaries in order to keep the lights on at the Nou Camp, which is now known as the Spotify Nou Camp after a sponsorship deal with the streaming firm was inked during the summer.
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Laporta spoke of "economic levers" that Barcelona would be pulling in order to try and act as it if was business as usual in the transfer market this summer. The sale of the naming rights for the stadium went along with the selling off of 25 per cent of their TV rights to private equity fund Sixth Street Investments (which has since been claimed to have been artificially inflated) and 49.95 per cent of Barça Licensing & Merchandising (BLM), the company owned by Barcelona that is responsible for negotiating licences and merchandising, to allow them to realise some cash quickly.
They signed Robert Lewandowski, Franck Kessie, Raphinha and Andreas Christensen but weren't able to register them until last week as they continued to try and find ways to get themselves around La Liga's imposed salary cap, a salary cap designed to curb the spending of the club and aid its financial recovery.
But Laporta has placed his energy in believing that investing in the team no matter the risk offers the best chance of Barcelona returning themselves to former glories, the club having built itself into a global brand that needs the success to be able to bring about increased revenue streams in the future.
The spending of the Spanish side, who had been linked with a rather ambitious plot to land Trent Alexander-Arnold from the Reds, has flummoxed many across Europe, with the club adopting an approach to continue spending to try and get themselves out of a financial hole born from their own reckless spending but exacerbated by the impact of the pandemic.
Among those to be scratching their head is Liverpool boss Klopp, who revealed in an interview with German newspaper Kicker, via Die Welt, that he did not understand how they had been able to continue their summer spree. The German Reds boss also drew on his own past experiences at Borussia Dortmund.
"Not for a variety of reasons," Klopp told Kicker.
"One reason is I'm not a financial professional. The second; If I'm told I don't have any money, then I don't spend anything anymore. My credit card has also been cut up twice, luckily that was a few years ago. I'm watching this like a football fan, I don't understand. I've just found the club to be outstanding for the past few decades that I've been watching football and I hope they pull it off.
"The only club I know that ever sold the stadium and other rights in advance was Borussia Dortmund . Aki Watzke (Hans-Joachim Watzke, CEO of Dortmund) had to come at the last second and save the whole thing. And I don't know if there is an Aki Watzke in Barcelona."
Barcelona have been in decline for a number of seasons. They had been able to strong-arm many of Europe's biggest teams when it came to taking their talent, including Liverpool.
But it was an approach that would prove to be flawed with the Reds using much of the £148m they received from Barcelona for Philippe Coutinho in 2018 to transform their team into Champions League and Premier League winners through the additions of players like Virgil van Dijk and Alisson Becker. The Coutinho deal remains something of a sliding doors moment for both clubs.
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