The Athletic.

Well, the group stages of the Champions League are now over and despite pulling various levers,

Barcelona have not qualified for the knockout stages.

What has gone wrong then and probably more importantly what are the financial consequences of being eliminated.

Plus with other Champions League Stolwalls, Athletico and Juventus, also going out,

does a less predictable Champions League make for a better competition

and weaken the argument for a European Super League? I'm Mark Chapman. This is the Athletic Football Podcast.

I'm joined today by Spanish football journalist Alvaro Romeo and the athletics Ollie Kay.

Come on to the bigger picture with all the all these big clubs going out in a little while but

Alvaro let's start with Barcelona who whose financial issues

and financial turmoil is presumably going to get worse because of the elimination.

I think that Barcelona's worries are going to get only worse because the team had budgeted to reach the championship quarterfinals because they did a hell of an investment in the summer just making sure or they wanted to make sure that the team was going to be competitive again, which they are at the 13th degree,

definitely domestically, but then in Europe the team hasn't been up to the challenge,

maybe the manager neither, and this financially will have some repercussions, of course.

I think that it is not unthinkable to predict that Barcelona will try to trigger with new levers this summer.

And obviously if they can off load a couple of players and probably the three captains

who are making a lot of money and are draining Barcelona's finances, well that

would be a success for Barcelona.

The only, I mean we keep going back to these levers don't they, mainly because they talked

about them in the first place.

Is it the only lever left available to them the selling of players or getting players off their

wage book?

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