16/12/2025
🔥 FC Barcelona is not a SAD and cannot be bought or sold...per the law here's why, lemme take you through 👇👇
The media have reported that Mohammed bin Salman or Saudi investors, linked to the global push of the PIF in sport (Newcastle United, LIV Golf, etc.), would be considering an offer of around €10 billion to “buy” FC Barcelona—something presented as a rumor with no official confirmation from the club or the competent authorities.
FC Barcelona, as a basic non-profit sports club, cannot be “sold” legally to the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman under the same terms as a Sports Public Limited Company (SAD); at most, a capital-entry operation could occur only if the club were first effectively transformed into a SAD through the corresponding legal procedure.
Any potential Saudi interest and the rumors of a €10 billion offer do not, by themselves, change this framework, because Barça’s associative structure and the ultimate ownership vested in the members and the general assembly prevent a direct transfer of “ownership” as if it were a shareholding package.
Nor can the operation that Florentino Pérez is allegedly pursuing with Real Madrid—transferring the business line of the non-profit association Real Madrid CF to a company created ad hoc—be used as a model, since such an operation entails stripping the club of its core economic activity into a commercial company, thereby de facto allowing private appropriation of the economic flows of the first team or the brand. This enters the realm of deviation from the associative form and possible abuse of legal personality.
Civil and insolvency case law has classified as fraud of law and abuse of legal personality those operations in which the original entity is emptied of substance or a company is instrumentalized to evade a mandatory legal regime (such as those arising from leases, creditor protection, or labor obligations), a criterion that can be analogously applied to any attempted hollowing-out of a basic sports club to circumvent the discipline of the Sports Law governing associations and SADs.