On Thursday, longtime Barcelona goalkeeper Marc-André ter Stegen announced via an open letter to the club's fans that he will undergo back surgery, and that as a result he will miss "about three months." A short while later, the club reportedly leaked through Catalonian radio station RAC1 that, contrary to ter Stegen's announcement, it regards his recovery time as "between 4–5 months."
An athlete announcing their own surgical recovery timetable isn't unheard of, but it is slightly unusual; typically that sort of thing goes through an organization's official communications shop. An athlete and an organization publicly disagreeing on a player's surgical recovery timetable, likewise, is pretty rare relative to the total number of pro athlete surgeries, but not really remarkable. What's interesting and worth examining in this instance is indicated by the fact that Barcelona's projected recovery timetable for ter Stegen is longer than ter Stegen's. Usually, you'd expect it to be the other way around, for easily legible reasons: The club would like its worker back at the revenue-generating part of their job as soon as possible rather than collecting paychecks for physical therapy, and the worker—the one of the parties, after all, who endures the pain and surgery and recovery, and whose career prospects are affected by injury—would like maximum security against having to go through it all again. In this case it's the player saying he'll be back in three months, and the club saying no, it'll be more like four or five. What's this all about?
The first thing to know, as with basically anything having to do with Barcelona, is that the club remains in deep financial trouble as it recovers from years upon years of arguably ongoing criminal mismanagement. It has managed to offload some salary in the present summer transfer window—Ansu Fati (loaned to Monaco) and Clément Lenglet (transferred to Atlético Madrid) are the big ones, but Pablo Torre (sold to Mallorca) is gone, too, and Pau Víctor reportedly is headed to Portugal—but likely not nearly enough to balance the club's books, a Shangri-La governed by what's known in La Liga as the 1:1 rule, under which a club can spend in direct proportion to money it brings in via sales or saves via, well, savings. For years, and currently, Barça has had to operate under La Liga–imposed spending restrictions designed to steer it toward solvency, under which it can only spend, on new acquisitions and pay raises, around a quarter of what it raises or saves.
(Here is a handy encapsulation of how broke Barcelona is, the tattered state of its affairs, and to what depths of shamelessness it has had to stoop for the sake of what a club its size should have the privilege of regarding as pocket lint. For several hours on Thursday the squad's scheduled trip to Japan for a preseason friendly against Vissel Kobe was delayed and reportedly on the verge of outright cancellation—with the squad reportedly already somewhere along the actual departure process, if not quite on the plane yet—by a standoff over money between the club and the match organizers. According to reports, the organizers had paid €10 million of an agreed €15 million fee to Barcelona, and were withholding the remaining €5 million until they'd confirmed that Barça's personnel were on the plane and on their way to Japan. Barça leadership, in turn, reportedly refused to let its personnel board the airplane until they'd confirmed receipt of the money.
After some number of hours of this embarrassing nonsense, the Japanese technology company Rakuten reportedly stepped in and agreed to cover the €5 million, and Barcelona dutifully boarded the plane. This left unanswered the delightful question [likely with its own shady answer!] of how Barcelona ended up in agreement with a match organizer so scuzzy its fulfillment of payment terms had to be secured by holding the match hostage at the airport—and/or how match organizers ended up in agreement with a club so scuzzy its actual participation in the match had to be secured by withholding its payment until its people were actually in the air. It also laid bare, for all to see, the low state of one of the flagship operations in global soccer, squabbling over relative chump change for a preseason friendly, like an antsy juvenile pot dealer demanding you exchange dime bag and ten-spot on the count of three.)
The next thing to know is that Barcelona bought 24-year-old Catalonian goalkeeper Joan García away from crosstown rival Espanyol earlier this summer, explicitly to be the club's new number-one guy between the posts for now and the foreseeable future. After a few years of injury problems and sharply declining performance, especially in the actual goal-keeping part of the job, 33-year-old ter Stegen missed nearly all the 2024–25 season recovering from a ruptured patellar tendon; his backup, Iñaki Peña, fell out with manager Hansi Flick after a couple months of mostly uninspiring work and was in effect exiled from January onward. Redoubtable cig-blasting ancient Wojciech Szczesny, scraped out of retirement when ter Stegen got hurt, wound up manning the goal—admirably, but not without the type of harrowing moments you might expect from a creaky old shot-stopper newly tasked with sweeping up behind the highest and most aggressive line in Europe—for virtually all the competitions that mattered. As a stopgap solution he was fantastic, better than anybody could have hoped for, but is also clearly not a long-term solution. Thus: García.
But a club that can scarcely afford any goalkeepers under its league-mandated spending limits now finds itself with four of them, only the least-desired of whom would be able to take the pitch if the league started today. Club brass view García as the guy, but he may not be able to play if the club can't register his contract with the league; Szczesny, extended for two more cheap years, is the affordable and reliable backup, though he too remains unregistered. Peña, the only keeper currently registered with the league, would be literally anywhere else in the world if anybody at the club could wave a magic wand and make it so. And then there is ter Stegen, by seniority the club captain, and by salary the most expensive of the four GKs, but definitely not valued as the number-one anymore—who management certainly hoped would take news of García's arrival as an indication that it's time to find a new club, but who has not.
Here are some more salient things worth knowing, in no particular order.
- Earlier this week, Barça completed arranging a loan of forward Marcus Rashford from Manchester United, with Barça reportedly on the hook for the entirety of his wages for the season.
- Fresh off a spectacular season that saw it win La Liga and a pair of domestic trophies, Barça gave big honking contract renewals to a handful of players, most notably 18-year-old exploding global superstar Lamine Yamal, whose gross pay reportedly increased something like tenfold.
- Extensive renovations to the club's Camp Nou stadium, which have kept the Blaugrana playing their home matches in smaller, more remote alternatives for two full seasons, appear nowhere near complete, which could doom the club to at least another half-season of sharply depressed revenues.
- Though management would certainly like to, and though the club certainly needs all the income it can get, Barça has not made any apparent progress toward selling off either Ronald Araújo (good, expensive, largely superfluous) or Fermín López (young, had a great season, should have lots of suitors, would in an ideal world not be for sale), and could not even get Monaco to assume all of Fati's gigantic salary for his one-season loan, which includes a non-mandatory purchase option.
And!
- Under La Liga rules, for the sake of fairness, a club otherwise up against a spending limit can register a new salary up to 80 percent of that of an injured player's, provided that player will definitely miss at least four months of action—the span of time between the close of the summer transfer window and the open of the January one. Once a player has been registered in this way, the injured player they're (theoretically) replacing cannot return to league play for at least four months, to prevent any "miraculous" healings.
All of that comes together like this: Since the club has not been able to pressure ter Stegen into leaving, it now needs his back surgery to keep him out for at least "4–5 months" so that it can register other salaries—like for example, that of García, who reportedly will make only a little less than ter Stegen in base salary this coming season—under La Liga's spending limit. For his part, ter Stegen certainly knows this; it's no great stretch to imagine that, on top of any other reasons for wanting to control the duration of his absence, by preventing the club from using that absence to register García he might also hope to prevent García from cementing his place in the lineup before ter Stegen can return to fight for it. At any rate the message seems clear: After a decade of service and a salary deferral during the early depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, and pissed off about the club's blatant efforts to force him out, the captain is in no mood to help Barça get rid of him.
This will get ugly—or even uglier than it already is. Copious leaks now portray the club as "angry" with ter Stegen, ostensibly over his surgery announcement not having gone through the club first, actually over his refusal to spend the summer finding another place to work. There's talk of stripping him of his captaincy—a pretty extraordinary move at a club where captaincy in general is set by seniority, and where Sergi Roberto inherited and kept the armband for a full season in which he was a virtually unused substitute of absolute last resort—due to ter Stegen's "attitude," which no one at the club has yet dared characterize under their own name. (Supposedly it is uncaptainly or whatever for him not to have coordinated his public statement with the club.)
The leakers are even applying pressure to Flick, as close to gold-plated as any soccer manager can get after he transformed the team in a single season from a miserable plodding mediocrity into Europe's most entertaining side and La Liga champions. "Now it's Hansi Flick who must address the issue," writes Mundo Deportivo's Fernando Polo, "but he has the club's full support, starting with [sporting director] Deco and the board of directors." Implicit in there is a hierarchy of responsibility. If the club can't register García or Rashford, and if because of being unable to register them García and Rashford end up either watching La Liga matches from the stands or revoking their contracts altogether, and if that means the club spends the 2025–26 season relying on academy kids on the left side of the attack and Peña in goal, and if this turns into yet another hideous, embarrassing spectacle for a club that has spent the past handful of seasons slipping in puddles of its own barf and kicking itself in the ass on the way down, then it will be because 1.) ter Stegen refused to cooperate with the four-month registration gambit, and 2.) Flick has his hands on a lever that could help pressure him to do it, and the full backing of everybody above him.
What's going to happen? An outbound transfer for ter Stegen before the window closes on Sept. 1 seems all but totally out of the question: By his own timeline he almost certainly could not pass another team's medical exam before December. The next-safest-seeming prediction is that however all of this gets resolved, it will leave observers feeling at least vaguely disgusted.
Each of the past couple of summers Barça president Joan Laporta has flirted with failing to register new players, before finding ever more appalling and contemptible means of getting the job done, usually with La Liga's help and over the ever louder objections of La Liga's other clubs. Last summer, after not having missed the deadline to register Dani Olmo and Pau Víctor, and then only having belatedly registered them via deeply shady accounting of even shadier transactions, he defeated a court challenge to those registrations by arguing, in essence, that because he'd put Olmo and Víctor in jeopardy by flagrantly violating La Liga's rules, he should be exempted from enforcement of those rules by the harm that enforcement would do to Olmo and Víctor. Amazing! Despicable! An outrage and an insult!
In some respects the trickiest job in all of this is that of La Liga president Javier Tebas. His task is to play as Laporta's and Barcelona's enemy in public, for the sake of mollifying the rest of the league, while also unmistakably facilitating Barcelona in flouting both the spirit and the letter of the league's fair-play rules, for the sake of holding up one of Spanish soccer's indispensable tentpoles. For example: La Liga was the nominal plaintiff in the legal challenge to Olmo's and Víctor's registrations, even while pretty plainly having no interest in actually seeing those registrations voided. Amazing! Despicable! An outrage and an insult!
All of which is to say: Here we go again. Rashford and García very likely will be registered at some point, even if by all credible reckoning Barça should not be able to do it, for the simple reason that, now that their respective loan and transfer have been announced and celebrated, it's in just about all the principals' interests to get them playing in Barcelona shirts. The alternative spreads around a lot of shit for the eating, including some for parties who might otherwise really enjoy watching Laporta chow down. When I sorta line up my estimation of everybody's various incentives and interests and step back and look at them all together, I suppose what seems most plausible to me is that, after some period of brinkmanship between now and September, Barça and ter Stegen will work out some sort of mutual face-saving agreement that involves ter Stegen agreeing to miss four months and the club, like, letting him keep his nominal captaincy and promising not to chase him around with a stapler and a price-tag during the January transfer window.
That is not what I predict will happen! Do not record this as my having predicted that it would happen. I have no idea what will happen. I suppose it's perhaps possible that the club could simply go over ter Stegen's head and file some kind of official claim of a four-month absence with the league for the sake of registering García. That could be fun, if it caused all hell to break loose and ter Stegen sued the club and the league and tried to force his way back after less than four months and, like, a swarm of ants attacked Joan Laporta and ate all the flesh off of his head. For the record I do not predict any of that, either. I just hope for it.
