Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months, you’ll know that Barcelona are in a little bit of a mess these days.

The 8-2 loss to Bayern Munich in last season’s Champions League quarter-final kick-started a run of events with saw Lionel Messi try to leave and president Josep Maria Bartomeu vocally urged to walk before he was pushed.

Years of poor management have seen Barcelona rack up debts of close to £1bn, and their financial situation hasn’t exactly been helped by the need to pay Messi like the once-in-a-lifetime player he is.

Between inking his last contract in 2017 and watching it expire at the end of the current season, Messi will have pocketed no less than £492m for four years‘ work. That’s the biggest contract in sports history, and it’s not even close. Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes has a deal worth £402m, but that’s split up over ten years, not four.

£492m. That’s obscene.

Messi is obviously a special talent whose skill has earned him a hefty payday, but to pay him £69m every season just so he won’t leave the club is ridiculous. That’s the equivalent of signing a world-class player every summer, but that’s not the entire reason Barcelona are in the mud these days.

After all, while they’re signing one Messi every summer, they’re also splashing out a ridiculous amount of cash to sign other players.

£142m on Philippe Coutinho. £135.5m on Ousmane Dembele. £107m on Antoine Griezmann. These are three hugely expensive signings which feel as though they weren’t planned enough, and none of them have worked out.

That’s a combined £384.5m in transfer fees for those new players, and that doesn’t even factor in just how much that trio have earned in wages. It’ll all work out as similar to the £492m picked up by Messi, but the results from the spend on those three haven’t been nearly as good as with Messi.

With finding somebody capable of helping Messi proving even harder than imagined, Barcelona have been left needing to pay Messi ludicrous amounts of money just to keep him on board. The fear of failure has cost Barcelona more wages than any other sports team ever.

Coutinho, Dembele and Griezmann are usually seen as the poster boys for the financial mismanagement at Camp Nou, but they’re just the most significant examples.

Squad players like Neto, Junior Firpo, Martin Braithwaite, Jasper Cillessen, Malcom and Andre Gomes have all cost significant sums and offered very little in return, but it’s all indicative of Barcelona’s paralysing desire to win now.

For Barcelona, being second best is not good enough. Global domination is the only acceptable outcome, and the continued lack of success has only intensified the need to keep spending. They need the best squad in the world and are prepared to pay up to make sure they get it.

Success in La Liga is required but it plays second-fiddle to Champions League glory – something Barcelona haven’t tasted since 2015. As each failed tournament passes, club officials grow itchier to improve, and humiliating losses to Roma, Liverpool and Bayern only makes things worse. For Barcelona, the only way out of the hole is to spend.

Academy kids can’t be trusted because nobody knows if they’re good enough to make it as pros. You’ve got to spend £20m+ on someone with experience because it reduces the risk, and as a result of that lack of confidence, La Masia has been left to rot.

The talent factory which produced the likes of Andres Iniesta, Xavi and Messi himself has been cast to the wayside in favour of big-name signings who should be making Barcelona better, but the results haven’t come.

Because of this need for immediate success, Barcelona have been left with unsustainable debt, unsellable players and an academy which has only recently made it back from the brink of collapse.

You can’t run a business that way, and Barcelona are learning that now. Messi’s contract is atrocious, but it’s a drop in the ocean of everything that has gone wrong at Camp Nou in the last decade.

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