It was Víctor Font, second in the last electoral race for the presidency of Barça, who said that Joan Laporta had stopped being sportsman. And he may not be wrong, given everything that has happened since his triumphant return to the Camp Nou box and subsequent transfer to Montjuïc in order to turn the old into the new. It was a necessary work that the previous board of directors postponed sine diewhile the old stadium was falling apart, pigeon droppings were poured from the rafters onto the cooking plates of some snack shops, and the sports management was spending hundreds of millions on signing footballers with almost zero performance. The transfers of Griezmann, Coutinho and Dembélé alone represented an outlay of around 500 million euros, a third of the budgeted cost for the new temple.
A second miracle was expected from Joan Laporta. In its first stage, it had found itself a club destroyed economically and desperate in sports, so far from its main competitors in all aspects that one day a game was organized at dawn, gazpacho was distributed among the attendees, it was tied – almost of a miracle—against Sevilla and even today all that is remembered as one of the magical nights in the construction of the best Barça in history. It was Ronaldinho’s debut, of course. And the realization that charisma, shared equally between the playing field and the box, can generate a driving force capable of raising a dead person in the middle of his own burial. That’s where Laporta seems to be since his return. And even more so, if possible, since the revolutionary appearance of Lamine Yamal, but with the handicap that Rosell and Bartomeu ended up making Gaspart and Reyna good.
The current management is not criticized so much for the facts as for the forms, although some facts leave behind a trail of constant improvisation and kicking forward that invites us to discuss the direction set. Sales of future assets are questioned and some sports operations are looked at with a magnifying glass that, from the president’s point of view, must seem like the only way to resist the storms inherited from the past. Not even a club like Barça can aspire to the best sponsorships and financial agreements competing to enter the Europa League, hence the bets on footballers like Lewandowski, Koundé or Dani Olmo, unthinkable for a club in technical bankruptcy, but not for a Laporta is convinced of being able to multiply his loaves and fishes while waiting for his long-awaited return to the Camp Nou. The problem is not, therefore, in the search for the long-awaited miracle, but in the abuse of parables.
In this, his return to the helm seems to have led Laporta to almost constant non-compliance with his own word. The issue is no longer so much what he says as what he said, which is why many culés stir uneasily demanding what was promised, not so much what was dreamed. The trick of the external enemy, of everyone against me, or against us, crashes like a paper airplane against the newspaper library that the president himself has been filling with impossible statements without anyone asking for them, because everyone knows where it comes from. this Barça and you can even sense where it is going. But tricks are not miracles and the best version of the Messiah is expected from Laporta, not an intriguing approach to the shows of the Pop Magician.
