“One of the agreements with CVC is that Tebas continued eight years with a salary that doubles that of bank presidents”
“It’s good that Barça is not a SAD, because that makes us belong to the community”
The president of Barça, Joan Laporta, has analyzed the situation of Barça in the TV3 program ‘El factor clau’. Under the title: “The roots of victory. The case of FC Barcelona”, the former economic vice president in Laporta’s first presidency, Xavier Martí-i-Sala, has made some headlines for the maximum Barcelona rector.
Laporta has been especially hard with LaLiga, He has denounced a smear campaign against the club to take over his property and has defended the current property system.
These have been Laporta’s statements:
Negreira case
“The Negreira case is a campaign against Barça. You have to do self-criticism, but it was an inherited thing. Having arbitration advice is not a crime. Barça has never bought a referee, beyond the fact that perhaps we did not value sufficiently what it meant that the son of a former referee gave us advice. This has gotten out of hand, because there is an orchestrated campaign to keep Barçato transform Barça into a SAD”.
Attack on LaLiga and Tebas
“I link the Negreira case with the fact that we have not signed with CVC, fortunately, because it mortgaged Barça for 50 years. It is a fund that has kept 10.95 percent of the clubs’ television rights. It was still We did not see that it was an operation that could interest us. Needed as we were to save the club, what we did was sell 25 percent of our television rights for 686 million and that has saved the club. It has not finished it to fix, because we still have an operating deficit of 200 million that we are attacking with an austerity plan, but what we did not see was the contract with CVC”
“One of the conditions was that Thebes would stay, first for 15 years and then for eight. His salary doubles that of bank presidents. We were told that if we did this operation it would give us a fair play, 15 percent. He told us that if we didn’t sign we couldn’t sign or they would make it more difficult for us. This is in the courts. We said no and they put the cross on us. You come to the conclusion that Catalonia may be within the state, but even so, some cannot digest the elements that define our Catalan identity. They cannot digest that one of the elements of Catalan identity is Barça and they try by all means to keep it. Thus, what the gentlemen of the League, those of the CVC and other established powers want is this, but that they know that they are going to have us defending the interests of Barça to the last drop of our blood. We do this because we love Barça.”
The club must belong to the members
“It is good that Barça is not a SAD, because that makes us belong to the community. Barça belongs to the city, to the country, obviously to its members and that allows us to do many things that other clubs cannot do. Barça is Cruyff-Masia-Catalunya-Unicef. You can understand Cruyff as a genuine way of playing football. You can understand the Masia as the dream factory of those children who want to reach the first team. As for Catalonia, you cannot separate Catalanness from democracy and Barcelonaism is inseparable from those two concepts. And Unicef illustrates that Barça has a social commitment to values. That is more typical of an association such as Barça than a commercial company.
Criticism of the management of Sandro and Bartomeu
“When Qatar was put on, it seemed to me a big mistake, because the essences must be respected and it does not belong to our essence. So it was. It didn’t go well, because it led us to the Qataris themselves signing Neymar for 220 million euros. He caused people to react badly here by managing that money.”
“We also found good things in this second stage. The women’s game was good and we took advantage of it to win the Champions League. It is a credit to the previous board and ours, for setting two historic attendance records. It was spectacular and it makes me feel proud to be the president of Barça. We have a team that wins and we all like to win, but they also do it by playing well.”
The virtuous circle
“Soccer has a very powerful emotional factor. It is different from any business. For the rest it is not so different. You also invest, in this case in players, in facilities and picking up the virtuous circleinvesting in players makes members and fans link to the entity and the club, consume club and the economy is strengthened to invest in football again”