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15 hours ago
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Dani Olmo and Pau Víctor will be able to play for Barcelona after Spain’s supreme sports council (CSD) granted them temporary registration while it investigates an appeal lodged by the club against the removal of their licences by La Liga.
Registration did not arrive in time for Olmo or Víctor to play the semi-final of the Super Cup in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday night, but they will be available for Sunday’s final against Real Madrid or Real Mallorca.
A final, definitive decision is expected within three months. Both players missed Barcelona’s Copa del Rey tie with the fourth-tier side Barbastro at the weekend. The granting of a licence by the CSD, which is a government body, goes against previous rulings from the league, the federation and two courts.
The CSD said that not allowing Olmo and Víctor to play while the investigation was ongoing would amount to “serious economic and sporting damage to the club and, above all, the footballers”, adding: “This could also harm the interests of the Spanish national team and the rest of the national competitions, including La Liga.” It ruled that the players had “a right to a sporting career befitting their abilities”.
Barcelona had been prevented from extending the registration of Olmo and Víctor because they had exceeded the salary limit set by the league, which all clubs are signed up to. Although a late €100m sale of VIP boxes at the revamped Camp Nou, which is still under construction, brought them back under the limit, that deal with unnamed middle eastern investors had not been completed in time to meet the 31 December deadline. The club had previously failed with two lawsuits raised against the ruling.
Olmo, who had signed for an initial €48m in the summer despite them being over their €462m salary limit then, had been registered until the end of December because of an injury to Andreas Christensen. League rules allow clubs to “use” 80% of the salary paid to an injured player to register an alternative. Aware of the risks, Olmo had a clause inserted into his contract allowing him to walk away as a free agent if the club failed to register him.
With time running out, an application was made to the federation for a new licence on New Year’s Eve. But a statement from the league that night said that Barcelona had done “nothing [...] to allow them to register any player from 2 January” and, by the following morning, both players had been removed from Barcelona’s squad.
Nor could Barcelona re-sign them effectively as free agents once they had met the financial criteria, as Spanish clubs are prohibited from registering the same player twice in a season. On 4 January, following a meeting of the Comisión de Seguimiento del Convenio de Coordinación RFEF-LaLiga, the body which overseas the agreement on governance between the two bodies, the league and the federation issued a joint statement in which they said they could not register Olmo or Víctor based on the “literal interpretation of articles 130.2 and 141.5 of the General Regulations of the RFEF”.
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That wording, while it appeared superficially clearcut, opened the door to an alternative interpretation of the ruling, effectively inviting a challenge. Barcelona took a 50-page report to the CSD insisting that the spirit of the rule preventing players from being registered more than once was not intended for such cases. It also questioned the authority of the commission to decide on the application of the agreement between the league and the federation.
On Wednesday the CSD ruled that it would investigate the case, suspending the agreement laid out by the joint league and federation commission. While the CSD insisted that its decision did not foreshadow any final decision nor represent a judgment on the content of the case itself, calling this a temporary, cautionary measure, known in Spain as a cautelar, it finally delivered the verdict that Barcelona had sought via many means: on Thursday Olmo and Víctor will be back in the squad.
