CHAPTER 12.
The Struggle for Democracy at Barcelona FC
L'Elefant Blau
In recent years, the Spanish football world has undergone dramatic change, as clubs have been transformed from non-profit associations to private corporations. Today, only four professional football clubs out of the 42 playing in the national Spanish leagues are not corporations. Barcelona Football Club (or ‘Barça’ to its friends) is one of them. The rapid change in the organisation and governance of Spanish football arose because of a lack of regulation concerning the economic and financial administration of football clubs. There is no equivalent in Spain to the English and Welsh Football Association’s Rule 34 which, although now circumvented (see chapter 2 by Conn for a discussion of this) served to delay the flotation of clubs in England. In Spain, the criteria ruling football’s economic and financial administration are rather obscure. The lack of specific rules in the face of the growing influence of media and sponsors is now more obvious than ever and threatens the traditional values of the game. Clubs like Barça, with a stadium capacity of almost 100,000 seats and a fan following that adds up to several million, have become a major target of the TV channels.
The ‘Elefant Blau’ (Blue Elephant) is an association of Barça fans established two years ago with the aim of democratising the club’s governance structure and preserving its original status as a non-profit sports organisation. The association is trying to save footballing traditions by putting emphasis on the need for updating Spanish football legislation to take account of the present challenges. The management of a professional club like Barça, with a multi-billion-peseta annual budget, requires greater regulatory control. The days when the club was run by a handful of enthusiastic and altruistic sportsmen are over.
The past
Barcelona Football Club will be 100 years old in November 1999. At the end of last century the city of Barcelona experienced an economic boom. In the wake of the 1888 Universal Exhibition, the town underwent a period of intense development. A rush of foreign capital in search of the high returns granted by fast growing industries and services such as textiles, metals, water, transport and energy supplies, poured in. Barcelona Football Club was founded by a group of foreign sportsmen (mostly British and Swiss residents) working on the technical staff of different ventures set up at the turn of the century by international companies and Catalan investors. The first president of the club was Mr Walter Wild, a British citizen, and the first match, played only a few days after the club’s foundation (8 December) was played between the newly founded Barcelona Football Club and a team formed by a group of young British residents. Barcelona Football Club was legally conceived as a non-profit private association financed by the contributions of its members.
Despite the leading role of its foreign founders, the club immediately assumed the main objectives of the Catalan society of which it was a part. ‘Sport and Citizenship’ was a slogan of the time strictly followed by the first presidents of the club, who always gave their support to initiatives invigorating the cultural identity of Catalonia. Therefore, Barça was not only a sports club but a civic entity that participated in the most significant Catalan movements of the time including the campaigns for autonomy for Catalonia, for Catalan schools, for Catalan language courses for club members, and so on. It thus became the only Spanish football club with a really active cultural programme.
This goes some way to explaining why the two military dictatorships suffered by Spain in the present century both tried to shut down the club. Both regimes considered the ‘unity’ of Spain as something holy and languages other than Castilian as something evil. General Primo de Rivera closed the club in 1925. General Franco did the same thing 14 years later when his troops occupied Barcelona at the end of the Spanish Civil War. But the outcome of both closures was exactly the same: the reinforcement of the idea that Barça was in fact playing the role of a non-existent Catalan national team; a last refuge for Catalan nationalism. Therefore, to win a championship always meant something more than a mere trophy for Barça. During the military dictatorships our club, like a few other cultural institutions, became one of the last outlets left for the expression of the Catalan identity. Hence, to win against Real Madrid meant for years a victory of democracy against the tyranny of a politically centralised and culturally uniform Spain.
The present
Nowadays, the role of the club as a shelter for traditional Catalan values is somehow outdated. Post-Franco Spain is a democracy, Catalonia has got back in large measure its national political rights and institutions, the use of the Catalan language in everyday life is increasing and there are almost as many Catalan schools as can reasonably be expected. The problem is that in the last 20 years, under the club presidency of Mr Núñez, our rights as members of the club have been dramatically reduced. In short, as Catalonians our situation has improved, but as members of Barcelona Football Club our situation has deteriorated.
Every new statutory reform introduced by Mr Núñez and his board of directors has resulted in an erosion of the members’ social rights. Just over 3,000 club members form the assembly of delegates, the highest governing body of the club, but they are not elected; they are selected every two years using a mysterious computer program not noted for its impartiality. Moreover, the board does not make public the names of the appointed delegates. In the Franco period, 30 years ago, the club had to publish the list of names, including the delegates’ addresses, so that every member could know who was actually representing them at the assembly. Today, the members get only a long list of numbers: the 3,000 numbers of the 3,000 member cards drawn from the computer lottery. It is hard to imagine how a member can submit a motion to the assembly without knowing who his delegates are or how to meet them. As a result, the 100,000 club members are prevented from effectively exercising their democratic rights to raise issues via their delegates.
The control and supervision of the list of members is another key responsibility of the assembly that has been taken over by the current president and the board. Like the list of delegates, the list is withheld by the board on the excuse of people’s privacy in case of unwanted commercial or political marketing. Without a means to canvass the members it is hard to imagine how a member of the club might attempt to challenge the existing president in an election. Unless completely foolhardy, no one is likely to be willing to take the risk of standing for the presidency in such an unfair competition.
As a result of the emergent lack of democracy in the club, the club’s management is now able to act practically uncontrolled, not only in the social field but also in respect of the club’s economic activity. For instance, there is a lack of transparency on accounting procedures: there are no clear rules that specify exactly how players are accounted for, and the accounting criteria concerning the club’s other intangible assets are even cloudier. Until recently, an independent committee appointed by the assembly assumed economic control. This Economic Committee was supposed to monitor the expenses and the execution of the annual budget. But today, the assembly (which includes an ever-increasing number of delegates directly appointed by the president) simply rubber stamps the selection of the Economic Committee proposed by the club’s managers. The fact that the Economic Committee is currently chaired by Mr Núñez’s son gives some indication of the degree of its independence.
The present anti-democratic trend is strengthened by another factor, namely the diminishing participation of the members’ contributions to the club’s global income. Twenty years ago, the revenue from season tickets used to cover almost the whole budget. Today, these contributions amount to only about one third. New income sources (primarily television) make up the gap. This tendency is likely to continue in the foreseeable future. The last Barcelona Football Club budget (for the 1997/98 season) was almost 15 billion pesetas. Expenses are rising at an impressive rate and the members’ economic contributions cannot keep up with that pace. But this should not and cannot be used as an argument for cutting down the members’ social and democratic rights. The club’s main assets are its 100,000 members and its millions of fans. Similarly, the members are also the club’s only proprietors. No matter how much income the club earns, the whole income of the club depends on its members, not on the television networks or on the sports equipment multinationals. That, at least, is our point of view, despite the fact that in the event of the club folding, nobody knows precisely to whom the assets would go.
To summarise, the club executives are trying to take full control of an institution that runs a multi-billion-peseta budget. The next step is easily predictable: its partial or total transformation into a pure commercial company increasingly engaged in other fields than those of football, and able later on to be quoted on the Stock Exchange. Other people’s property, other people’s business.
Like many other Spanish clubs, Barcelona Football Club has been intrigued by the American model of the NBA with its enormous advertising returns, its rewarding marketing operations and its ‘pay-per-view’ incomes. Our feeling is that all those clubs have ignored fundamental differences between American basketball and European football. Basketball fits much better than football into the show business frame. Basketball admits the pure exhibition of a star-team like the Harlem Globetrotters. Moreover, the sport has been packaged in a television format geared towards multiple commercial breaks, cheerleaders and pre-match entertainment designed to attract a large variety of audiences. But a football match is something else; it is a far cry from a circus. It requires the partisan engagement of the audience. It is the ‘shared emotional ownership’ (fan equity) evoked by Sean Hamil in his discussion of the social fabric of football (chapter 1). Without this key ingredient, football can be a rather lukewarm and passionless form of entertainment. Football is a game that both depends on and inspires a strong sense of community identity which, in turn, engenders support from the fans.
A realistic approach to the football business has to keep in mind that a club is a social entity, which embraces far more complicated elements than the figures that appear in its balance sheet. A football club’s life cannot be bound to the policies of a telecommunication’s mogul or to the interests of a multi-national shoemaker. That is the reason why the ‘Elefant Blau’ was founded. Its first mission was the promotion of a vote of censure against President Núñez and his board, as provided by the 49th article of the club statutes.
In the beginning, there were only six people in the ‘Elefant Blau’, but very soon the group increased substantially, thanks in large measure to the board’s strong resistance and opposition to our project. This resistance was so openly treacherous and mafia-like that it ultimately proved to be beneficial to the ‘Blue Elephant’s’ cause. It could be said that Mr Núñez and his colleagues gave ‘The Elephant’ wings. To explain the campaign in detail would take up too much space and go beyond the main focus of this chapter. However, an important aspect of our strategy was to establish support for a vote of censure. We gathered more than 6,000 members’ signatures (more than the required 5 per cent – or 4,500 – of the electorate) and on Sunday, 8 March 1997, a match day against Real Madrid in the Barça stadium, the vote took place with an astonishing success for the ‘Blue Elephant’. Some 40,000 members voted, almost 15,000 of them for the censure. As usual, Mr Núñez got the votes of his untouchable army of 25,000 followers. The explanation of such high fidelity would divert us as well from this chapter’s main subject.
Needless to say the ‘Elefant Blau’ did not win the battle. However, it gave the club’s board a serious warning. At least one of its most worrying designs, namely the macro-project called ‘Barça-2000’, has been apparently postponed. The idea behind ‘Barça-2000’ was to build a kind of Disneyland park surrounding the stadium with all sorts of bars, cinemas, shops and other facilities tangential to our club’s vocation, which is (as declared by the first article of the statutes) the promotion, practise, diffusion and exhibition of football and other sports. If the proposal for ‘Barça-2000’ had gone ahead it would have paved the way for the conversion of the club into a joint-stock company.
The future
The democratisation of Barcelona Football Club is, of course, our primary goal but it cannot be reached under the present circumstances. The short-term objective must therefore be to put an end to the megalomania of President Núñez, who is seriously jeopardising the club’s future. We need to democratise the club statutes, in order to boost membership participation and increase the degree of accountability and transparency. The President’s mandate should be limited to no more than two terms of four years each and the delegates should be appointed through democratic elections. At the very least, the updating and publication of the membership roll must occur if the present questionable electoral practices are to be democratised. In short, our club needs efficient and transparent management. Last but not least, it also needs to be modernised, but this process should look at the next century without overlooking the positive developments made this century.
As Europeans we favour freedom of movement for everybody. So, footballers should be able to play wherever they want in the European Union, as the Bosman ruling has instituted. It would not be consistent with the tradition of our club, which was founded by foreigners, to refuse foreign players. Also inconsistent, however, would be to disregard the development of our own young players. This is an economic requirement as well. The massive import of foreign stars has its limits. The cost of the players is presently absorbing about half of the club’s annual budget. Clubs are inflating transfer fees and salaries in an irresponsible competition and it would seem that many of them have already gone too far. This is true for Barcelona Football Club, which has already overspent in advance of the expected revenues from its TV contracts.
There is more than the simple economics of football at stake. Many football amateurs have been in the game from their childhood with the dream of one day reaching the Barça professional team. However, the traditionally strong incentive to play football is losing momentum in Catalonia. The dream is fading as the club relies more and more on foreign stars and sells its own home players for cash. As discussed above, supporters and communities need to identify with their players. But it is obviously more difficult to keep this relationship going as commercial pressures threaten to undermine traditional links between football clubs and local communities.
That is why we would like to propose for discussion some ideas we have in mind for a new model for the European championships in general, but more specifically on the relation between football and television. No doubt television can be an extremely efficient medium for spreading football’s popularity. But it could become a very dangerous weapon as well. The concentration of television broadcasting rights in a few hands together with the control of one or more clubs is a worrying prospect. (For a discussion of the implications see chapter 5). Securing free and fair competition on the football field must become a key priority. To attain this goal we advocate:
• open European championships, which means the rejection of monopolies of any kind for a few big clubs
• football clubs to be independent of broadcasting companies
• national leagues limited to a maximum of 16/18 clubs
• maximum legal term (4/6 years) for players’ contracts
• price of transfers in accordance with players’ salary
• abolition of cancellation clauses in players’ contracts
To conclude, we find ourselves in agreement with the arguments made by Michie and Walsh (chapter 13) that the revamp of the European Champions League should not be inspired by the TV and commercial interests. Priority must be given to the broader wishes of supporters and players.
Notes
The main authors of this chapter are Elefant Blau members Armand Carabén, Alfons Godall, Joan Laporta and Jordi Moix.
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