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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football...lona-barca-went-mes-que-un-club-just-another/
The Madridification of Barcelona: How Barca went from 'Més que un club' to just another global superbrand
8 MARCH 2017 • 5:31PM
Part 1 - Empire State
“Barça is a global club. But the world is a big place, and right now we are occupying very little space.”
Josep Bartomeu, Barcelona president
Last September, Barcelona opened their first office in New York, and they decided to make a bit of an entrance. Outside the Waldorf Astoria where the club’s executives and officials were staying, the Barcelona flag flew alongside the Stars and Stripes. At night, the Empire State Building was lit up in the club’s red and blue colours. Ronaldinho made a surprise appearance at a Bronx secondary school and played football with gawping kids. “We want to get closer to our fans,” explained club president Josep Bartomeu.
But to discover the real reason for Barcelona’s visit, you had to go to an upmarket restaurant in midtown Manhattan. There, over a sumptuous liquid lunch, Bartomeu and vice-president Manel Arroyo spent the day schmoozing executives from some of Wall Street’s blue-chip companies: Morgan Stanley, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, BlackRock.
Since Bartomeu took over as president in 2014, he has had two main aims: to burnish the club’s global reputation, and then use that reputation to print money. His stated goal is to make Barcelona the first club in history to break €1 billion in revenue. And because Barcelona already make plenty of money in Spain, that money, as Bartomeu puts it, “must come from the international market”.
New York is Barcelona’s second overseas headquarters - the other is in Hong Kong - and part of an aggressive strategy to push the Barcelona brand into North America. A network of Barcelona soccer schools has been established across America and Canada, and Bartomeu himself has given lectures at Harvard Business School via video link. He told students: “We hope to become the most admired, cherished and global club in the world.” Two more offices, in Shanghai and Sao Paulo, are scheduled to open later this year.
Meanwhile, the club’s commercial department has been scouring its brains identifying new revenue streams. You can now get an FC Barcelona university qualification in anything from architecture to psychology to big data. You can buy a bottle of FC Barcelona Tempranillo red wine. You can even pay to hire the Barcelona team bus for a function. Barcelona, the football club built by Joan Gamper at the start of the 20th century as an expression of Catalan regional identity, is now a global brand being leveraged for purposes that are only tangentially connected with football.
Two days after celebrating the opening of an office that would hold just four employees, the Barcelona top brass were back at the Camp Nou, where they watched their team getting beaten 2-1 by Alaves.
Part 2 - The End Of The Road
“A year at Barcelona is like two anywhere else.”
Victor Valdes, former Barcelona goalkeeper
They were chanting Luis Enrique’s name at half-time on Saturday night. Celta Vigo were well on their way to a 5-0 drubbing; Lionel Messi scored one of those effortlessly dazzling goals you have seen him score a hundred times before; Barcelona were going back to the top of La Liga. “Lucho, we love you, please stay,” the fans sang. But it was a valediction rather than a benediction. For Enrique is already on his way out.
Enrique does Ironman triathlons in his spare time, but it had taken just three seasons for the Barcelona job to exhaust him. Historically speaking, it was a decent effort. Since the Second World War, only two Barcelona managers have ever made it past four seasons. Frank Rijkaard did five, and ended up a hollow, haunted husk of a man, his managerial career destroyed. Johan Cruyff did eight, and had a heart attack.
It is Barcelona’s torrential internal currents that make it one of the most draining jobs in football. At most English clubs, power traditionally flows in a linear fashion: upwards to the owner, downwards to the fans. Barcelona, by contrast, is owned by its fans: the 177,000 socios who do not simply watch games but vote in presidents, voice discontent, feed the media snowball. “A rumbling volcano,” is how Cruijff described it.
f you had to pinpoint an exact moment when Enrique decided he no longer wanted to sit on the volcano, it was three weeks ago at the Parc des Princes. That night, a shambolic Barcelona were destroyed 4-0 by Paris Saint-Germain in the last-16 of the Champions League. Watching PSG cut Enrique’s lethargic team to shreds, was a genuinely shocking experience: a watershed moment in the history of a great club. Since embarking on their golden era more than a decade ago, Barcelona have often been beaten. They have even been well beaten. But this was different. They were being bullied.
Afterwards, Enrique lost his cool. Grilled on his tactics by Catalonian television, he snapped: “I accept all the responsibility. But also when I win, I receive the same personal treatment in the interviews, the same tone that you are using to question me right now.” According to reports, the pair continued arguing after the cameras were switched off, and eventually had to be physically separated.
Five days later, the Camp Nou booed Enrique during a 2-1 win at home to Leganes. Ten days after that, Enrique resigned.
Part 3 - Reign Of Fire
“Money is secondary. Before anything else there should be principles, values. Barça has lost them.”
Johan Cruyff, 2015
For all the turmoil off the pitch, for all the quixotic results on it, Barcelona are not in crisis. Three big wins have put them top of La Liga, and even given them a faint hope of turning things around against PSG on Wednesday night. But there is a far more subtle and tectonic battle taking place at the world’s most famous football club, and it goes much deeper than their outgoing manager. In a way, it is a battle for Barcelona’s soul.
Joan Laporta was president of Barcelona between 2003 and 2010, and oversaw perhaps the most remarkable transformation in the club’s history. When he took over, the club had just finished sixth, their lowest position since the 1980s. Within three years, Frank Rijkaard had led Barcelona to their first ever Champions League title. When he departed, it was Laporta’s decision to turn down Jose Mourinho and appoint an untried coach called Pep Guardiola.
For a certain section of the Barcelona fanbase, Laporta’s reign was a return to the good old days. He brought back club legend Johan Cruyff as an adviser and appointed him honorary president. He invested heavily in La Masia, the club’s academy, which he calls “our dreams factory”. He believed in playing football the Cruyff way: a quick passing style that went all the way through the club, from the under sevens all the way to the first team. For a few golden years, on and off the pitch, Barcelona charmed the world.
But in 2010, Laporta was replaced by his former vice-president Sandro Rosell, who offered a different vision of the club’s future. Rosell, a former Nike executive, believed Barcelona needed to face up to the realities of the marketplace or get left behind. He accused Laporta of leaving the club in heavy debt, and promised a more robust financial model that would give Barcelona the financial clout to compete for the world’s best players. The signings of Neymar and Luis Suarez, for a combined total of around £120 million, gave Barcelona one of the most feared strike forces the sport has ever seen.
In 2014, Rosell was forced to step down in favour of his friend and ally Bartomeu, but the silverware continued to flow. Enrique’s Barcelona won the treble in 2015 and the double last season. This season, however, they have found the going somewhat tougher, with problems surfacing that have been brewing for a while.
Recruitment has been one: Suarez apart, Barcelona’s recent transfer history has been a catalogue of expensive failures. Much-heralded new signings like Arda Turan, Andre Gomes and Paco Alcacer have failed to make much of an impact. Established players like Dani Alves have been allowed to leave without being adequately replaced. The result is a strangely lop-sided Barcelona team: still good enough to beat most sides, but shockingly vulnerable on their off-days.
Meanwhile, the fabled La Masia production line is showing signs of drying up. Like his predecessor Tata Martino, Enrique has been accused by some Barcelona fans of neglecting the academy; in fact, over his three seasons he has given debuts to 16 La Masia graduates. And while the likes of Munir and Rafinha may yet establish themselves, the vast majority have simply not been good enough. Promising youngsters like Alex Grimaldo and Gerard Deulofeu have been let go. And so Barcelona have been forced to rely ever more heavily on the usual suspects: a small core of increasingly untouchable stars: Messi, Suarez, Neymar, Iniesta, Busquets, Pique.
Just how untouchable became apparent in January, when a club director called Pere Gratacos dared to venture an opinion about Messi that stopped short of raptuous eulogy. “Leo is one of the most important players in the team,” he said. “But Leo without Neymar, without Suarez, without Iniesta, without Pique, would not be as good a player. Although it is clear that he is the best player.” Within hours, Gratacos had been sacked.
Yet as Barcelona face up to the prospect of their earliest Champions League exit in seven years and a manager at the end of his tether, there has been some encouraging news too. The latest Deloitte Money League saw them overtake Real Madrid in terms of revenue for the first time since Deloitte started compiling the list two decades ago. At €620 million, it may still be some way short of Bartomeu’s €1 billion target. But off the pitch, Barcelona are making enormous strides.
Not that everyone is happy about it. Laporta, now frozen out, has been scathing in his criticism of the current regime. “It’s been a while since this board started destroying Barcelona,” he said. “The only thing they are doing is taking advantage of what we left, and dedicating themselves to their own business, doing their own thing.”
The state of Barcelona in 2017, then, can be summarised thus: an unbalanced squad hampered by poor recruitment but elevated by a clutch of genuine world-class stars, a two-tier dressing room, a neglected academy, and unprecedented commercial performance. Now, who does that remind you of?
Part 4 - Content Provider
“The best players pay for themselves.”
Jose Angel Sanchez, Real Madrid marketing manager, early 2000s
To understand the modern Barcelona, you need to understand the modern Real Madrid, and to understand both, you need to understand Manchester United. During the 1990s, United did not just dominate English football. They changed the way football clubs thought about generating money. They were the first club to exploit the emerging markets of east Asia, the first club to recognise the money-spinning potential of corporate hospitality, the first club to set up their own TV channel. By the turn of the century, they were the richest club in the world, and Real and Barcelona were among the many continental rivals looking on enviously.
Florentino Perez won the Real Madrid presidential election of 2000 on an audacious promise to poach Luis Figo from Barcelona. During the subsequent years, a period that came to be known as the “galacticos” era, Real embarked on one of the most stunning acquisition policies the sport had ever seen. Over four successive summers, Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo and David Beckham arrived at the Bernabeu at a total cost of €218 million. Later years brought Kaka, Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale, James Rodriguez. When United signed Paul Pogba last summer, it ended an unbroken 16-year period during which Real had held the world transfer record.
If the spending seemed indiscriminate, there was a method to the madness, and it was inspired - believe it or not - by The Lion King. Real’s executives had studied the way Disney managed to create not just a box-office smash, but a long-term entertainment brand that generated merchandising and spin-off revenues long after the film had left the cinemas. That would be the Real model: put on a show, bring in the crowds, and then shake them down for every last cent.
United may have blazed the trail, but Real went further than anyone before in redefining a football club as content provider and the football itself as an entertainment commodity. “The best players pay for themselves,” explained Jose Angel Sanchez, the club’s marketing manager. “They will deliver the best performance and the best spectacle. Real Madrid is a brand, and the product - the players and the games - is the content. Everything we do flows from this.”
In July 2003, Madrid unveiled their latest signing: David Beckham. The press conference was held at 11am in order to make the evening news in Asia. It attracted the second-highest live television audience in history, after the funeral of Princess Diana. “That was a turning point, because of what he represented,” an unnamed Madrid director discloses in Sid Lowe’s Fear and Loathing in La Liga. “His arrival was the scientific proof that the spectacle was more important to us than the game itself.”
Results began to bear this out. Keeping their galaxy of stars happy and balancing the books required sacrifices to be made elsewhere. The focus on signing prime attacking players left the squad woefully unbalanced. Perez’s insistence on playing the stars at any cost saw a succession of coaches ushered out of the back door. Fringe and middle-ranking players began to complain that the galacticos were getting preferential treatment. Many were eased out, hollowing the squad still further. Results nosedived. For the first time since the early 1950s, Real went three consecutive seasons without a trophy. Meanwhile, the club’s training ground was sold to pay for further spending.
“Real Madrid has no game plan,” wrote Santiago Segurola in El País. “It is the product of a commercial idea that has relegated the actual sport to a secondary role. It spends enormous sums of money signing up stars, but they do not make a team. They are, rather, a disappointing mosaic, with some players in their twilight years, and others included solely for their commercial appeal.”
Just as Real were heading into their slump, Barcelona were emerging from theirs. Rijkaard led Barcelona to their second European Cup in 2006, and two years later he was replaced by Guardiola, who would win two more. And as Guardiola’s home-grown squad swept all before them, it was possible to see them as a rebuke to the entire galactico ideology, a triumph for the cantera, for localism, for organic talent. Just as Cruyff and Laporta had envisaged.
Off the pitch, however, something quite different was happening.
Part 5 - Forward
“To me, Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And it's a woman who's extremely vain.”
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, author
When Laporta wrested control of Barcelona in 2003, the club were in dire trouble. Wages were a whopping 88 per cent of income. The commercial operation was primitive. Laporta noted with chagrin that while United were charging €2 million for a friendly, Barcelona commanded just €300,000.
And so while Rijkaard and then Guardiola were taking La Masia’s finest right to the top, Laporta was busy turning Barcelona into a lean, mean commercial machine. He renegotiated the club’s debt payments. He went on a subscription drive that increased the club’s membership by more than 60 per cent. And when the opportunity presented itself, he was not averse to signing a galactico of his own. Rosell used his Nike contacts to seal the signing of Ronaldinho in 2003, who over subsequent seasons would be followed by the likes of Samuel Eto’o, Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
Unlike at Real, however, all this was done with a veneer of idealism. Barcelona would spend big, but as vice president Ferran Soriano put it, they would do so with “a responsibility to society beyond the sports arena”. In 2006, Barcelona made Unicef their first ever shirt “sponsor”, paying the organisation €7 million to carry their logo. Laporta, a staunch separatist, also aligned Barcelona closely with the Catalan independence movement. In recent years, the slogan “mes que un club” has become a convenient stick with which to beat Barcelona. But briefly, fleetingly, it seemed to ring true.
Once Rosell arrived, that changed. The Unicef logo was moved from the front of the shirt to the small of the back, the bit you tuck in. In came the Qatar Foundation, followed by Qatar Airways in 2013. And in stark contrast to Laporta, who frequently provoked criticism with his references to the “Spanish oppression” of Catalonia, when the region held an independence referendum in 2015, Bartomeu was not interested. “I will not voice an opinion,” he said. “We have always spoken about sport. We don’t take part in campaigns.”
Bartomeu, you suspect, is a man with little time for petty regional politics. His visions have a much broader scope. His next project is the expansion of the Camp Nou from 97,000 to 105,000, with the number of VIP seats rising from 1,800 to 10,000. For the first time, naming rights for the stadium will be sold to the highest bidder, who will likely have to fork out hundreds of millions of euros.
Naturally, the purists will squeal, but Bartomeu’s reponse is that in order to maintain Barcelona’s position at the top of world football, commercialisation is not an option, but an obligation. All of which brings us to perhaps the most important question of all. Does Barcelona make money to exist? Or does it now exist to make money?
The Madridification of Barcelona: How Barca went from 'Més que un club' to just another global superbrand
8 MARCH 2017 • 5:31PM
Part 1 - Empire State
“Barça is a global club. But the world is a big place, and right now we are occupying very little space.”
Josep Bartomeu, Barcelona president
Last September, Barcelona opened their first office in New York, and they decided to make a bit of an entrance. Outside the Waldorf Astoria where the club’s executives and officials were staying, the Barcelona flag flew alongside the Stars and Stripes. At night, the Empire State Building was lit up in the club’s red and blue colours. Ronaldinho made a surprise appearance at a Bronx secondary school and played football with gawping kids. “We want to get closer to our fans,” explained club president Josep Bartomeu.
But to discover the real reason for Barcelona’s visit, you had to go to an upmarket restaurant in midtown Manhattan. There, over a sumptuous liquid lunch, Bartomeu and vice-president Manel Arroyo spent the day schmoozing executives from some of Wall Street’s blue-chip companies: Morgan Stanley, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, BlackRock.
Since Bartomeu took over as president in 2014, he has had two main aims: to burnish the club’s global reputation, and then use that reputation to print money. His stated goal is to make Barcelona the first club in history to break €1 billion in revenue. And because Barcelona already make plenty of money in Spain, that money, as Bartomeu puts it, “must come from the international market”.
New York is Barcelona’s second overseas headquarters - the other is in Hong Kong - and part of an aggressive strategy to push the Barcelona brand into North America. A network of Barcelona soccer schools has been established across America and Canada, and Bartomeu himself has given lectures at Harvard Business School via video link. He told students: “We hope to become the most admired, cherished and global club in the world.” Two more offices, in Shanghai and Sao Paulo, are scheduled to open later this year.
Meanwhile, the club’s commercial department has been scouring its brains identifying new revenue streams. You can now get an FC Barcelona university qualification in anything from architecture to psychology to big data. You can buy a bottle of FC Barcelona Tempranillo red wine. You can even pay to hire the Barcelona team bus for a function. Barcelona, the football club built by Joan Gamper at the start of the 20th century as an expression of Catalan regional identity, is now a global brand being leveraged for purposes that are only tangentially connected with football.
Two days after celebrating the opening of an office that would hold just four employees, the Barcelona top brass were back at the Camp Nou, where they watched their team getting beaten 2-1 by Alaves.
Part 2 - The End Of The Road
“A year at Barcelona is like two anywhere else.”
Victor Valdes, former Barcelona goalkeeper
They were chanting Luis Enrique’s name at half-time on Saturday night. Celta Vigo were well on their way to a 5-0 drubbing; Lionel Messi scored one of those effortlessly dazzling goals you have seen him score a hundred times before; Barcelona were going back to the top of La Liga. “Lucho, we love you, please stay,” the fans sang. But it was a valediction rather than a benediction. For Enrique is already on his way out.
Enrique does Ironman triathlons in his spare time, but it had taken just three seasons for the Barcelona job to exhaust him. Historically speaking, it was a decent effort. Since the Second World War, only two Barcelona managers have ever made it past four seasons. Frank Rijkaard did five, and ended up a hollow, haunted husk of a man, his managerial career destroyed. Johan Cruyff did eight, and had a heart attack.
It is Barcelona’s torrential internal currents that make it one of the most draining jobs in football. At most English clubs, power traditionally flows in a linear fashion: upwards to the owner, downwards to the fans. Barcelona, by contrast, is owned by its fans: the 177,000 socios who do not simply watch games but vote in presidents, voice discontent, feed the media snowball. “A rumbling volcano,” is how Cruijff described it.
f you had to pinpoint an exact moment when Enrique decided he no longer wanted to sit on the volcano, it was three weeks ago at the Parc des Princes. That night, a shambolic Barcelona were destroyed 4-0 by Paris Saint-Germain in the last-16 of the Champions League. Watching PSG cut Enrique’s lethargic team to shreds, was a genuinely shocking experience: a watershed moment in the history of a great club. Since embarking on their golden era more than a decade ago, Barcelona have often been beaten. They have even been well beaten. But this was different. They were being bullied.
Afterwards, Enrique lost his cool. Grilled on his tactics by Catalonian television, he snapped: “I accept all the responsibility. But also when I win, I receive the same personal treatment in the interviews, the same tone that you are using to question me right now.” According to reports, the pair continued arguing after the cameras were switched off, and eventually had to be physically separated.
Five days later, the Camp Nou booed Enrique during a 2-1 win at home to Leganes. Ten days after that, Enrique resigned.
Part 3 - Reign Of Fire
“Money is secondary. Before anything else there should be principles, values. Barça has lost them.”
Johan Cruyff, 2015
For all the turmoil off the pitch, for all the quixotic results on it, Barcelona are not in crisis. Three big wins have put them top of La Liga, and even given them a faint hope of turning things around against PSG on Wednesday night. But there is a far more subtle and tectonic battle taking place at the world’s most famous football club, and it goes much deeper than their outgoing manager. In a way, it is a battle for Barcelona’s soul.
Joan Laporta was president of Barcelona between 2003 and 2010, and oversaw perhaps the most remarkable transformation in the club’s history. When he took over, the club had just finished sixth, their lowest position since the 1980s. Within three years, Frank Rijkaard had led Barcelona to their first ever Champions League title. When he departed, it was Laporta’s decision to turn down Jose Mourinho and appoint an untried coach called Pep Guardiola.
For a certain section of the Barcelona fanbase, Laporta’s reign was a return to the good old days. He brought back club legend Johan Cruyff as an adviser and appointed him honorary president. He invested heavily in La Masia, the club’s academy, which he calls “our dreams factory”. He believed in playing football the Cruyff way: a quick passing style that went all the way through the club, from the under sevens all the way to the first team. For a few golden years, on and off the pitch, Barcelona charmed the world.
But in 2010, Laporta was replaced by his former vice-president Sandro Rosell, who offered a different vision of the club’s future. Rosell, a former Nike executive, believed Barcelona needed to face up to the realities of the marketplace or get left behind. He accused Laporta of leaving the club in heavy debt, and promised a more robust financial model that would give Barcelona the financial clout to compete for the world’s best players. The signings of Neymar and Luis Suarez, for a combined total of around £120 million, gave Barcelona one of the most feared strike forces the sport has ever seen.
In 2014, Rosell was forced to step down in favour of his friend and ally Bartomeu, but the silverware continued to flow. Enrique’s Barcelona won the treble in 2015 and the double last season. This season, however, they have found the going somewhat tougher, with problems surfacing that have been brewing for a while.
Recruitment has been one: Suarez apart, Barcelona’s recent transfer history has been a catalogue of expensive failures. Much-heralded new signings like Arda Turan, Andre Gomes and Paco Alcacer have failed to make much of an impact. Established players like Dani Alves have been allowed to leave without being adequately replaced. The result is a strangely lop-sided Barcelona team: still good enough to beat most sides, but shockingly vulnerable on their off-days.
Meanwhile, the fabled La Masia production line is showing signs of drying up. Like his predecessor Tata Martino, Enrique has been accused by some Barcelona fans of neglecting the academy; in fact, over his three seasons he has given debuts to 16 La Masia graduates. And while the likes of Munir and Rafinha may yet establish themselves, the vast majority have simply not been good enough. Promising youngsters like Alex Grimaldo and Gerard Deulofeu have been let go. And so Barcelona have been forced to rely ever more heavily on the usual suspects: a small core of increasingly untouchable stars: Messi, Suarez, Neymar, Iniesta, Busquets, Pique.
Just how untouchable became apparent in January, when a club director called Pere Gratacos dared to venture an opinion about Messi that stopped short of raptuous eulogy. “Leo is one of the most important players in the team,” he said. “But Leo without Neymar, without Suarez, without Iniesta, without Pique, would not be as good a player. Although it is clear that he is the best player.” Within hours, Gratacos had been sacked.
Yet as Barcelona face up to the prospect of their earliest Champions League exit in seven years and a manager at the end of his tether, there has been some encouraging news too. The latest Deloitte Money League saw them overtake Real Madrid in terms of revenue for the first time since Deloitte started compiling the list two decades ago. At €620 million, it may still be some way short of Bartomeu’s €1 billion target. But off the pitch, Barcelona are making enormous strides.
Not that everyone is happy about it. Laporta, now frozen out, has been scathing in his criticism of the current regime. “It’s been a while since this board started destroying Barcelona,” he said. “The only thing they are doing is taking advantage of what we left, and dedicating themselves to their own business, doing their own thing.”
The state of Barcelona in 2017, then, can be summarised thus: an unbalanced squad hampered by poor recruitment but elevated by a clutch of genuine world-class stars, a two-tier dressing room, a neglected academy, and unprecedented commercial performance. Now, who does that remind you of?
Part 4 - Content Provider
“The best players pay for themselves.”
Jose Angel Sanchez, Real Madrid marketing manager, early 2000s
To understand the modern Barcelona, you need to understand the modern Real Madrid, and to understand both, you need to understand Manchester United. During the 1990s, United did not just dominate English football. They changed the way football clubs thought about generating money. They were the first club to exploit the emerging markets of east Asia, the first club to recognise the money-spinning potential of corporate hospitality, the first club to set up their own TV channel. By the turn of the century, they were the richest club in the world, and Real and Barcelona were among the many continental rivals looking on enviously.
Florentino Perez won the Real Madrid presidential election of 2000 on an audacious promise to poach Luis Figo from Barcelona. During the subsequent years, a period that came to be known as the “galacticos” era, Real embarked on one of the most stunning acquisition policies the sport had ever seen. Over four successive summers, Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo and David Beckham arrived at the Bernabeu at a total cost of €218 million. Later years brought Kaka, Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale, James Rodriguez. When United signed Paul Pogba last summer, it ended an unbroken 16-year period during which Real had held the world transfer record.
If the spending seemed indiscriminate, there was a method to the madness, and it was inspired - believe it or not - by The Lion King. Real’s executives had studied the way Disney managed to create not just a box-office smash, but a long-term entertainment brand that generated merchandising and spin-off revenues long after the film had left the cinemas. That would be the Real model: put on a show, bring in the crowds, and then shake them down for every last cent.
United may have blazed the trail, but Real went further than anyone before in redefining a football club as content provider and the football itself as an entertainment commodity. “The best players pay for themselves,” explained Jose Angel Sanchez, the club’s marketing manager. “They will deliver the best performance and the best spectacle. Real Madrid is a brand, and the product - the players and the games - is the content. Everything we do flows from this.”
In July 2003, Madrid unveiled their latest signing: David Beckham. The press conference was held at 11am in order to make the evening news in Asia. It attracted the second-highest live television audience in history, after the funeral of Princess Diana. “That was a turning point, because of what he represented,” an unnamed Madrid director discloses in Sid Lowe’s Fear and Loathing in La Liga. “His arrival was the scientific proof that the spectacle was more important to us than the game itself.”
Results began to bear this out. Keeping their galaxy of stars happy and balancing the books required sacrifices to be made elsewhere. The focus on signing prime attacking players left the squad woefully unbalanced. Perez’s insistence on playing the stars at any cost saw a succession of coaches ushered out of the back door. Fringe and middle-ranking players began to complain that the galacticos were getting preferential treatment. Many were eased out, hollowing the squad still further. Results nosedived. For the first time since the early 1950s, Real went three consecutive seasons without a trophy. Meanwhile, the club’s training ground was sold to pay for further spending.
“Real Madrid has no game plan,” wrote Santiago Segurola in El País. “It is the product of a commercial idea that has relegated the actual sport to a secondary role. It spends enormous sums of money signing up stars, but they do not make a team. They are, rather, a disappointing mosaic, with some players in their twilight years, and others included solely for their commercial appeal.”
Just as Real were heading into their slump, Barcelona were emerging from theirs. Rijkaard led Barcelona to their second European Cup in 2006, and two years later he was replaced by Guardiola, who would win two more. And as Guardiola’s home-grown squad swept all before them, it was possible to see them as a rebuke to the entire galactico ideology, a triumph for the cantera, for localism, for organic talent. Just as Cruyff and Laporta had envisaged.
Off the pitch, however, something quite different was happening.
Part 5 - Forward
“To me, Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And it's a woman who's extremely vain.”
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, author
When Laporta wrested control of Barcelona in 2003, the club were in dire trouble. Wages were a whopping 88 per cent of income. The commercial operation was primitive. Laporta noted with chagrin that while United were charging €2 million for a friendly, Barcelona commanded just €300,000.
And so while Rijkaard and then Guardiola were taking La Masia’s finest right to the top, Laporta was busy turning Barcelona into a lean, mean commercial machine. He renegotiated the club’s debt payments. He went on a subscription drive that increased the club’s membership by more than 60 per cent. And when the opportunity presented itself, he was not averse to signing a galactico of his own. Rosell used his Nike contacts to seal the signing of Ronaldinho in 2003, who over subsequent seasons would be followed by the likes of Samuel Eto’o, Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
Unlike at Real, however, all this was done with a veneer of idealism. Barcelona would spend big, but as vice president Ferran Soriano put it, they would do so with “a responsibility to society beyond the sports arena”. In 2006, Barcelona made Unicef their first ever shirt “sponsor”, paying the organisation €7 million to carry their logo. Laporta, a staunch separatist, also aligned Barcelona closely with the Catalan independence movement. In recent years, the slogan “mes que un club” has become a convenient stick with which to beat Barcelona. But briefly, fleetingly, it seemed to ring true.
Once Rosell arrived, that changed. The Unicef logo was moved from the front of the shirt to the small of the back, the bit you tuck in. In came the Qatar Foundation, followed by Qatar Airways in 2013. And in stark contrast to Laporta, who frequently provoked criticism with his references to the “Spanish oppression” of Catalonia, when the region held an independence referendum in 2015, Bartomeu was not interested. “I will not voice an opinion,” he said. “We have always spoken about sport. We don’t take part in campaigns.”
Bartomeu, you suspect, is a man with little time for petty regional politics. His visions have a much broader scope. His next project is the expansion of the Camp Nou from 97,000 to 105,000, with the number of VIP seats rising from 1,800 to 10,000. For the first time, naming rights for the stadium will be sold to the highest bidder, who will likely have to fork out hundreds of millions of euros.
Naturally, the purists will squeal, but Bartomeu’s reponse is that in order to maintain Barcelona’s position at the top of world football, commercialisation is not an option, but an obligation. All of which brings us to perhaps the most important question of all. Does Barcelona make money to exist? Or does it now exist to make money?
