“FC Barcelona and FC Valencia Under Investigation for Allegedly Falsifying Accounts Through Player Swap”

Did FC Barcelona and FC Valencia use Jasper Cillessen and Neto’s player swap to falsify the accounts? This allegation is currently pending, which is why the public prosecutor’s office is now taking on this complex issue.

Prosecutors are investigating FC Barcelona and FC Valencia

FC Barcelona is the subject of a prosecutor’s investigation, they report Sports world and the SPORT consistent. However, this is not about the allegation of corruption in the ‘Negreira case’, but about a player swap that FC Barcelona made with FC Valencia in 2019. Back then, substitute goalkeeper Jasper Cillessen left the Blaugrana and joined Los Ché, while Valencia goalkeeper Neto went the opposite way to Catalonia. So far there was nothing reprehensible about this deal. However, it wasn’t a one-for-one swap, Barça sold Cillessen to Valencia for €35m and in return signed Neto for €26m plus bonus payments.

These sums were well above the market values ​​of the players at the time. The sole reason the transfers were made was to embellish the balance sheets of the two teams, at least that’s what Miguel Zorío, former Valencia vice-president, claims. In January, he placed a complaint against his former employer and its majority shareholder, Peter Lim. The MD reports allegations of “false accounting, unfaithful administration, corruption between private individuals and breaches of public finances”.

Did Barça use the Cillessen-Neto swap to falsify the accounts?

Commenting on the Barcelona-Valencia swap deal, Zorío said: “The goalkeepers were sold at a price that is not market-leading in order to prevent Peter Lim from posting a loss of more than €30m on the club’s profit and loss account. FC Barcelona directors benefited from the same accounting tricks. It is an offense of accounting falsification, for which the directors and owners of Juventus have already been sanctioned and removed from management. Specifically, it involves fictitious capital gains, false accounting, market manipulation and fraudulent tax returns.”

However, this goalkeeper swap was not the only time that FC Barcelona attracted attention with dubious player swap deals in the recent past. It was similar in 2020, when Miralem Pjanic and Arthur changed clubs, at that time Juventus Turin was the transfer partner – this very Juventus, which is currently the focus of an investigation in Italy because of exactly such barter transactions for possible accounting falsification purposes and has already been sanctioned, albeit the original point deduction was temporarily reversed.

Balance sheet trick: That’s why Barça wants to sell Arthur to Juve

Balance sheet trick: That’s why Barça wants to sell Arthur to Juve

Balance sheet trick provides accounting advantages

From an accounting point of view, such deals are advantageous because when a player is bought, the transfer fee paid is spread over a few years, whereas any profit from the sale of players is booked immediately to the accounts, so they do not have transfer fees in the year a player is bought in write down the full amount in the books, but write off the costs evenly over the contract period of the player – the so-called amortization. From a legal point of view, however, it is difficult to prove whether transfer fees for players were intentionally overestimated, since market values ​​are only a theoretical value and can be interpreted differently by everyone. It should therefore be anything but easy for the public prosecutor’s office to prove a criminal act in the exchange deal between FC Barcelona and FC Valencia.