People worldwide have theories of what’s ailing FC Barcelona. The club’s president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, has his own: the decline began when Barca’s coach Tito Vilanova got cancer and then died last year.
“Of course we’ve reduced [performance],” Bartomeu admits, in a private lounge above his presidential lodge one chilly night. “But nobody is responsible for this. It’s because somebody died in the middle and we are mourning. We’re not conscious of this. But we are in mourning.”
Certainly there is unhappiness in the giant club. It’s not simply that Barcelona have lately been outstripped on the field by rivals Real Madrid. Worse, many fans feel that Barca is no longer Barca.
“Mes que un club” (“More than a club”) is its Catalan motto and, until recently, Barcelona lived up to that. Its mostly homegrown team played bewitching attacking football in shirts that advertised the UN children’s fund Unicef. Barca prided itself on decency.
From 2010 through 2013, Madrid’s coach, Jose Mourinho, a verbal provocateur, helped by playing the baddie to Barcelona’s good boys. But now Barca’s image is crumbling: the unique short-passing style is fading, the shirt carries the logo “Qatar Airways”, the youth academy has stopped producing world-beaters and the club is shedding icons. Poor Bartomeu is left trying to repair things.
Two hours before a big match, he walks into the empty presidential lodge, a smiling, bespectacled, understated presence in this land of egomaniac club presidents. He has spent much of today running his engineering company.
His moment in the limelight arrived unexpectedly. Bartomeu is something of a Catalan Gerald Ford. Like the 1970s US president, he was a vice-president who took over amid scandal: his predecessor Sandro Rosell resigned last year over irregularities in the purchase of the Brazilian forward Neymar.
Like Ford, Bartomeu isn’t expected to last: grumbling among Barcelona’s 150,000 socios (members) about his unelected status forced him to call early presidential elections this summer. It will be the biggest democratic spectacle in sport. Even Real Madrid only has about half Barca’s membership, notes Bartomeu.
Many socios are upset that Barcelona keeps losing icons. Coach Josep “Pep” Guardiola resigned, Vilanova died, and the club’s spiritual father, the very difficult Dutchman Johan Cruyff, sits in his villa in Barcelona fuming at the board. Retired captain Carles Puyol quit his staff job in January after Bartomeu sacked sporting director Andoni Zubizarreta.
Now fans fear Barca’s best player Lionel Messi will leave. Bartomeu is categorical: “People say, ‘Messi, he’s sad, he’s leaving.’ It’s not true. We don’t have any doubt that Leo Messi will continue playing in our club. He has a contract until 2018.”
Are you sure he will be here next season?
“Next season, and the following, and... Well, look, last June, July, on this table” — Bartomeu points at the conference table across the room — “we renewed his contract. His family is here, in the city, happy this is his club.”
But Messi has strong views on how his teams should play. Does anyone at Barca have a word with him before buying Neymar or Luis Suarez? Bartomeu laughs: “No. His relationship with the team is correct. But he doesn’t decide anything at the club. The decision in the club is made by the board, by professional people that work there.”
Barca’s signing of Suarez for €94m last summer caused controversy: the Uruguayan striker, already previously punished for biting and racism, had just bitten Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini at the World Cup. Should Barca be employing this man?
“Of course we had to help him,” says Bartomeu. “We always try when a player comes here to receive him as a person, not as a professional. The majority of our players are from our youth academy. They learn since they are young what we think should be those values that we want to show people. Well, in the case of Luis Suarez, some of these values he has because he learnt, but it was a challenge.
“It was a challenge to bring that person back to the football family. We think we are succeeding. Because now I see Luis Suarez — I talk sometimes with him — happy, integrated in a big club, polite, well-brought up. He had a problem that — well, we think we help him solving this.”
Bartomeu understands why football’s global authority Fifa suspended Suarez from matches for four months after the Chiellini affair. However, he is enraged that Fifa also banned Suarez from training or even watching matches in a stadium.
Moreover, Fifa has slapped another ban on Barcelona: because of irregularities in signing foreign players aged under 18, the club cannot make any transfers until 2016.
Bartomeu admits: “OK, we did something incorrect, on the documents for the registration of youth players for the federation. But in Europe or Spain, there are thousands of kids that play football with wrong documents. Many are young immigrants. So why only look at Barca? We have to be punished. But we cannot stop those children from playing. Because football for them is a way of socialising in a new country.”
Still, he says, for all Barcelona’s problems, “There are not any objective reasons to say we are unstable. Things are going pretty well. We put together the three best attackers, I think, in the world. Maybe Cristiano [Ronaldo] is, but having Leo Messi with Neymar and Suarez, I think it’s something extraordinary.”
Barca are on Madrid’s heels in the Spanish league and are still in the Spanish Cup and Champions League (where their next opponents are Manchester City). “This is the year we have to smile again. Sunrise and happiness go back to the Nou Camp!”
— Financial Times
