Sergio Busquets has agreed on wage deferral with Barcelona following on from veteran central defender Gerard Pique accepting a salary reduction with the club.
Experienced midfielder Busquets is out of contract at the Camp Nou in a year's time and while the length or value of his contract has not changed, he has agreed to defer payments to help ease the club's immediate outgoings. It comes as Barca race to register signings, piling the pressure on Frenkie de Jong to reduce his contract.
The Catalan giants have been unable to register their five new signings and two contract renewals this summer with La Liga and have been told to reduce their financial outgoings. Meetings were held with Pique and Busquets last week to persuade them to alter their contracts and both have now given their consent.
Busquet's agent Josep Maria Orobitg has agreed in principle with the club to reduce the midfielder's immediate salary – but the club will then owe the Spain international back payments in order to recompensate him for their agreed contract.
The 34-year-old has made 680 first-team appearances for the Blaugrana since his debut in 2008 and has been a mainstay of their midfield ever since. He is widely recognised as one of the greatest midfielders of this century due to his position at the base of the midfield trio.
The precise conditions of Pique's wage reduction or the deferral in salary from Busquets have not been clarified although Barcelona believe that they will help reduce their immediate outgoings sufficiently in order to help them get new signings over the line. La Liga starts on Saturday and the club must register new signings before their first match against Rayo Vallecano.
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De Jong is Barca's highest earning player and is also owed an additional €17million in unpaid wages. The player's agents Ali Dursun and Hasan Centikaya met with Barca chiefs on Wednesday last week and are urging the Dutch midfielder to push to be paid what monies he is owed.
Andreas Christensen, Franck Kessie, Raphinha, Robert Lewandowski and Jules Kounde have all joined Barca's ranks this summer, but none will be available for selection until La Liga inform them that their contracts are viable with the club's financial situation. The same registration issue applies to Ousmane Dembele and Sergi Roberto, who both signed new contracts after their previous deals expired.
Last summer, Pique took a salary cut to allow then-new signings Memphis Depay and Eric Garcia to be registered with La Liga before Busquets and Jordi Alba accepted pay cuts to allow Sergio Aguero to be registered. In January, Samuel Umtiti accepted a salary deduction – spread over a longer-term deal – to allow the club to sign Ferran Torres.
Barcelona's board – led by club president Laporta – have taken some drastic steps to raise funds this summer by sanctioning the sale of some of the club's major assets. Among the assets, the club opted to sell 25 per cent (across two separate transactions) of its TV rights to Sixth Street.
However, that was still not enough to put the club in a sufficiently healthy economic situation ahead of the new season, prompting them to sell a 25 per cent stake in Barca Studio to socios.com for a fee of around €100m. The combined selling off of club assets raised €767m for the club – and they had hoped to register their new arrivals with these sales. That was not sufficient, and Barca are now willing to sell up to 49 per cent of Barcelona studios.
