August 13, (THEWILL) – Barcelona has officially registered the signings of Robert Lewandowski, Raphinha, Franck Kessie, and Andreas Christensen as well as new contracts for Sergi Roberto and Ousmane Dembélé.
Lewandowski, who signed a $46 million contract with Barcelona after spending the previous eight seasons with Bundesliga team Bayern Munich, was the club’s marquee summer signing. Together with Raphinha, and Koundé, the trio cost La Blaugrana a combined $154 million.
In order to register their summer acquisitions, the club earlier sold 24.5 percent of Barca Studios, its in-house production company, to Orpheus Media for $103 million on Friday. It was the club’s fourth “financial lever” in the run-up to the 2022/2023 season as club president Joan Laporta continues to drag the club out of its financial constrains.
In two agreements totaling more than $520 million, Barca previously sold 24.5 percent of Barca Studios to Socios.com and 25 percent of its domestic television rights to Sixth Street. The club raised $615 million through those three transactions, but La Liga insisted that it needed to sell more assets or lower its wage bill to sign its new players. As a result, the club used its fourth financial lever on Friday.
Barca is still more than $1 billion in debt and is renegotiating Gerard Pique’s contract to free up additional salary space and ship out Frenkie de Jong but the latter wants to stay than take up the transfer to Man Utd which could bring in $80 million. Jules Koundé is the only player who has not yet been registered ahead of Barca’s Saturday evening season opener against Rayo Vallecano.
Jude Obafemi is a versatile senior Correspondent at THEWILL Newspapers, excelling in sourcing, researching, and delivering sports news stories for both print and digital publications.
