One of Joan Laporta or Victor Font is not telling the truth
Joan Laporta, president of FC Barcelona, appears in the first episode of the series 'A New Era', broadcast on Prime Video (Amazon), and at one point in the show he says to Xavi Hernández, Jordi Cruyff and Mateu Alemany: "Think that we have been on the verge of disappearing". There are many other voice clips, taken from different speeches and press conferences, where Laporta states on several occasions that "we have saved Barça from ruin".
This story and argument, which has become almost a mantra, has always been underpinned by the economic vice-president Eduard Romeu: "Barça was in the ICU and now we have managed to get it to the ward, but it is still sick." When he arrived, I remember he asked for two years of patience to turn the situation around. Recently, he asked for two more years. That makes four.
During these two years and four months of Laporta's mandate, the common denominator has always been the same: we are where we are because of the inheritance received from the previous board of directors. If we go through the newspaper archive, we will see that all the decisions taken by the current board have always been justified in the same way: because of the poisoned inheritance.
However, last Thursday, the candidate for the presidency of FC Barcelona in 2021, the businessman Víctor Font, made a speech that caused an stir in his second appearance before the press since the last elections: "They are not telling the truth when they say that they have saved the club and it has come out of the UCI. If there were elections today, the economic inheritance would be worse than it was two and a half years ago. And these are figures. We have more losses, more expenses, less assets and more debt". And he denounced the fact that the wage bill is currently higher than what Bartomeu left.
Víctor Font did not say anything different from what they have been affirming for months, from different watchtowers, men very linked to Barcelona like Toni Freixa, the economists Jaume Llopis and Marc Ciria, or numerous opinion groups. Groups which, by the way, FCBarcelona systematically ignores, forgetting that it was they who, together with Jordi Farré, initiated the last vote of no confidence and, as a result of this process, Bartomeu had to resign and elections were called which were won by Laporta.
Judge for yourselves who is right: Laporta or Víctor Font. Only one of the two, with the corresponding nuances, is telling the truth about FC Barcelona's economic situation. I am very sure about it.
