This thread wouldn't exist if you simply googled Barca's transfers. They have a net spend of 200 million Euros in the past 3 seasons (this season with De Jong so far included), which is normal for a club with their revenues.
Yeah, they bought Coutinho, Dembélé etc. but they have also sold players like Paco (20M), Yerry Mina (30M), Digne (20M), Deulofeu (13M), Paulinho (40M), Claudio Bravo (20M) and obviously Neymar for 222M.
They are averaging less than 70M per season. You think they are going bankrupt from that while making the same revenue as Manchester United but without shareholder interests?
A little more than that all things considered, I'll explain.
From what I've read through years, the thing about our wage structure is that it resorts to the "signing/loyalty bonus" formula to keep everything in check, and these bonuses (like the ones Neymar was supposed to get, and others like Leo, Busquets, Pique or Mascherano have collected in the past) aren't "included" in the wage bill, but the transfer budget instead.
What does that mean?
in 18/19 our net spending in transfers was +4M
17/18 -130M
16/17 -80M
15/16 --10M
14/15 -80M
13/14 -65M
12/13 -29M
11/12 -12M
That amounts to 50M/year spent on transfers in the last 8 seasons, I think it's fair to assume (from my memory) that would look like a small sum for the earnings a MU/Real/Barça team has, a lot of the budget reserved to transfers ends up going to sign/loyalty bonus, that's why our youth system is supposed to be so important (and hasn't been lately, that's another topic) and why some years when we spend 40M some journalists will say that we're "dried out of funds" and other years we can go for world record fees.
It's about lining up huge transfer windows and bonus payments in alternative years so the balance keeps in check, when those two things can't happen at the same time (like De Jong and De Ligt being available when maybe you'll have to pay some bonus) you need to resort to external financiation and take a little loss with the interest.
This is just my personal opinion and the version of the facts I think makes more sense, by no means do I actually believe this to be 100% truth. Maybe we do end up in bankruptcy in 10 years, only the board members truly know that.