No president has dominated the Barça machinery better than Laporta. He has been an opponent, a defeated and winning candidate, twice president and also knows very well how the motion of censure and the members’ assembly work, two decisive mechanisms in a democratic club and also as cainite as Barça. The anti-establishment leader in 2003 has become a system since his return to the stage in 2021. Today he controls the government as well as the environment when the entity is about to celebrate its 125th anniversary and inaugurate a stadium as loved as it has improved while the team leads the League.
Laporta handled himself wonderfully before the members with the attitude typical of populist leaders, one who lives by and for Barça and does not accept that his management be audited, even after an exercise so questionable that it deserved a reservation from the auditor: 12 million of ordinary profit and 91 of losses due to an invention that is difficult to explain called Barça Vision. The numbers were so susceptible to criticism that they caused the incipient and atomized opposition to come together to request the reformulation of the accounts in order to improve the health of Barça. The request ended up having a boomerang effect, luckily for Laporta.
The assembly became, through the mediation of the environment, a fight between those who rule and those who aspire to rule, from which Laporta emerged the winner. Only the vote on the second point on the agenda regarding the settlement of the games for the 2023-2024 season seemed to matter. The result was unequivocal: 452 in favor, 156 against and 26 blank out of a total of 927, a record number in a Barcelona telematic assembly. The votes are as visible as the goals at a time when virtuality and financial engineering are imposed after the levers managed to structure a team that went on to win the League.
The Blaugrana are once again leaders waiting to host Sevilla today and travel to the Bernabéu with Bayern in the middle in a Champions League match. The ownership of Peña announced by Flick seemed to captivate the Barcelona fans more than the other explanations of the board, except for the Espai Barça works, which also have their share and have increased doubts about the mortgages and creditors surrounding Barça. “We are much better than when we arrived in 2021,” said the president, whose term expires in 2026. “We have healed the wound that has been bleeding since 2017.”
It is not easy to question Laporta’s administration if Gaspart’s inheritance in 2003 and Bartomeu’s in 2021 are taken as a reference. He took over the club in extreme circumstances and, if anything, many Barcelona fans consider that he has already paid his debts with a motion of censorship in 2008, a liability action in 2010 and his candidacy in 2021 in times of Barcelona desertion, if Víctor Font is excepted. He has not yet warned anyone who could move his chair because so far he only hears “catastrophic proclamations from those who are not and are not expected.” “The only thing they create is a reality that does not exist,” Laporta concluded.
The president even resurrected the term “cavern” to refer to those who resort to the Negreira case to try to destabilize Barça. “We fight against everything and everyone,” Laporta emphasized. There was, in case there were any doubts, a surprising intervention during question time: “The auditor’s reservation is irrelevant. “Accounting is not a science,” says economist Xavier Sala i Martín, a friend of Laporta, former treasurer and president of the management company in 2006. A representative who was very graphic when he asked why the management of the board evoked him did not think the same. the series La Que se Avecina. “It is the series that I like the most,” replied treasurer Ferran Olivé. A summary dialogue of the situation of Barça.
Laporta precisely recalled that he never asked the partner to dig deep into his pocket to pay for the crisis, a decision that would explain social understanding and would attest to the president’s ability to always know what to do to ensure Barça’s governability. Nobody is more culé than Laporta.