I caught Joan Oliver one recent Saturday lunchtime, when he had found a rare bit of peace in his empty office in Barcelona, away from the madness of football’s transfer market. FC Barcelona’s chief executive is presiding over an off-the-field achievement as remarkable as the club’s European and Spanish titles on it. Barça is poised to become the club with the highest revenues – about €400m. Better yet, in an industry that burns money, they have made profits for six consecutive years. The team that starts its defence of the Champions League on Wednesday is also a proper business.

Oliver is one of the new breed of football executives who used to work in a normal business – in his case the FT group. He explains Barça’s economic model with the clarity of a man who has thought it through. In the hare-brained football industry, that’s anything but obvious.

“There are two main pillars,” he says. “The first is to have one of the best, perhaps the best, team in the world, without having to spend X million on players. The image of that is the Champions League final in Rome this year, with a team of seven players from our youth academy. The total acquisition cost of our team has been below €70m. We invest money to create players, not only to buy them. It’s not only an economic strategy. It’s part of the identity of the club.”

But Barça have been lucky, too. Three products of their academy, Leo Messi, Xavi and Andres Iniesta, would make a World Eleven. That won’t happen in every generation.

Oliver retorts: “Yeah, good fortune exists always in the world. Perhaps you could not always get the best player of the world from your academy. But we get six, seven first-team players.”

Other clubs produce promising youngsters too. Barcelona dares to field the kids in big games. That reduces the club’s reliance on football’s terribly inefficient transfer market. Oliver says: “The football business is usually managed with very short-term goals. Clubs spend irrationally and compulsively on players. You have always the temptation of thinking that if you buy two or three players, perhaps you will reverse the situation. That was perhaps the case of Chelsea in the past, and of Manchester City or, I think, Real Madrid now.”

Certain clubs – notably Real – buy stars partly for their marketing appeal. Would Barça ever do that? “No,” says Oliver, though he carefully avoids mentioning Barcelona’s main rival. “The best way for winning, at least for us, is to build the team for many years, probably from when these players are very young, in the academy. Then there’s another problem: if you are basing your commercial strategy on one player, it is very volatile. I think the case of LA Galaxy is the most evident – to found the strategy on a single player [David Beckham]. Finally, if you buy a player with the idea of his “sexiness”, you have a conflict of interest when you decide which player [to] play in the team.”

What’s the second pillar of Barça’s economic model? To build a global brand in the long term. That sounds obvious too, but most football clubs live for the day. For instance, they seek shirt sponsors. Barcelona, however, paid Unicef to put the charity’s name on the team shirts. Anyone in the world turning on the TV now sees at a glance that Barça are right to call themselves “more than a club”. Their growing brand makes them money. Oliver says the club’s contracts both for its TV rights and with Nike are “the biggest in the world for a sports club. The important thing – that’s our perception – is that we are the most valuable soccer brand in the world.”

The economic model works in good times and bad, he adds. Barça made profits while winning nothing in 2008, and made profits while winning the Treble last season. The latter feat was trickier than it sounds, because Barcelona’s players have performance-related contracts. “This year has been very complicated,” sighs Oliver. “We had to pay bonuses of nearly €40m.” The heart bleeds.