Financialization without shareholders: extending the disconnected capitalism thesis to a member-owned club (FC Barcelona, 2003–23)

What the paper says

This article explores how financialization takes hold in a large, member-owned football club, through an interpretive, longitudinal case study of FC Barcelona (2003–23). Using 20 audited consolidated reports alongside assemblies, auditors’ notes, and club grey literature, the analysis reconstructs the club’s evolving financial architecture and the justificatory vocabularies that accompany it. Two mechanisms underpin the process: access to new pools of finance via financialized actors and practices – most notably private equity investment and asset stripping – and through the implementation of financialized valuation metrics. The article’s core contribution aims to extend Paul Thompson’s (2003) disconnected capitalism thesis beyond employment relations by identifying three intertwined disconnections in a cooperative setting. (1)Vertical disconnection: playing staff are governed as intangible assets – managed through amortization and trading logics – while non-playing staff are treated as costs subject to outsourcing and compression; the divergence between rising headcount and falling average salaries, illustrate this split. (2) Organisational disconnection (structure/financing): sporting expansion is financed by alienating future revenues and creating equity-style instruments in subsidiaries, with balance-sheet signatures including episodes of negative equity, a higher share of non-current interest-bearing liabilities, and persistent cash-flow drain to financial obligations. (3) Cultural-democratic disconnection: decision making drifts from socis toward financial intermediaries and subsidiary arenas; auditors’ adoption of ‘the group’, together with forward-sale practices and identity reframing, hollow out the club’s cooperative ethos. We argue that financialization offers a stronger lens than commodification for grasping current industry trends and invite further research on the forms and limits of resistance.