If it wasn’t clear enough already, one prospective presidential candidate has laid bare the problems that are facing Barcelona, with bankruptcy hinted at as even being a possibility.
The recent en masse resignations of six members of the board of the club followed suggestions of impropriety, according to former vice president, Emili Rousaud, whose words to RAC1 were detailed by MARCA.
“I think someone has had their hand in the till, but I don’t know who,” he said.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the coronavirus pandemic forced the club into asking first-team players to reduce their salaries by as much as 70% in order to see the club through the next few months.
Now, Victor Font, who will be one of the presidential candidates campaigning for office in the 2021 elections, has also suggested that all kinds of mismanagement at the highest levels of the club is also to blame for Barca’s current, untenable, situation.
“If the risks were great, they have now become gigantic,” Font wrote in an open letter detailed by the Daily Mirror.
“Likewise, for months we have witnessed a shameful escalation of chapters in the club’s institutional behaviour […] what is at risk now is Barca as a whole.”
Though Font’s outburst might well be seen by many as the perfect opportunity for him to score points as he looks to position himself to take over from current president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, he clearly has a point.
The signing of Martin Braithwaite as emergency cover is just one of many decisions that needn’t have been made had the club been policing itself effectively and not continued to throw money at their problems.
Former president, Joan Laporta, even detailed as far back as 2015, just before the last elections, that Bartomeu and Co. would prefer to buy in players rather than bring them through the La Masia academy.
“I think that it is much better for the club to have La Masia as a pillar of the model of managing the club than to have another system that continues to go to the market,” he said to FourFourTwo in reference to the way in which the club were moving under Bartomeu’s stewardship.
Such a warning appears not to have been heeded, and now it appears that Barca are getting perilously close to imploding.