The Consejo Superior de Deporte (High Board of Sport) has made a very damning comment concerning the state of the Spanish football league. It’s mortally wounded if it does not the tackle the club debts.

Football might be the King of Sports, but the First Division and Second Division clubs are dragging a huge debt; part of which is to Seguridad Social and Hacienda.

Nobody would argue that it moves a lot of money, when you take into account, merchandising, TV rights, publicity contracts and not to mention multi-million transfer fees, but the fact remains that between 1999 and 2012 the collective debts of these two divisions has spiralled.

To give you an idea, in 1999 First Division clubs had debts of 1,100m euros, plus 87.7m to Hacienda and 3.6m to S.S. By the close of the 2011/12 season their debt had more than doubled to 3,300m, plus 467m to Hacienda and 10.8m to S.S.

Second Division clubs’ figures are not much better (worse if you consider their income), moving from 268m/44.4m/1.5m to 492m/143m/7.2m

For this reason the CSD, which is a government body, observed that in no moment of that period did the said divisions manage to turn any profits in their ordinary activities.

Nobody is putting into question the high level of professional sport contained within the two divisions – Real Madrid and Barcelona C.B. are two of the best teams in the world, indisputably. It’s just that, like the housing market, it has arguably got to the stage where it is a financial bubble, stuffed with over-inflated pricing, on the point of imploding.

“We have data that is very worrying budgeting imbalances, half of the competition is in temporary receivership, and if we do not do something to change this tendency the next step will be to put the clubs into liquidation,” says the CSD report.

(News: Spain)