When Barcelona came from a goal down to beat Sevilla at the Camp Nou on Sunday, it had to work harder for a home win in the Spanish league than it did in its victory at Arsenal a few days earlier in the Champions League.
Barcelona’s president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, said this is what he wants.
His club is on the verge of breaking the Spanish record for most consecutive games without a loss. Sunday’s win tied the record of 34 matches set by Real Madrid in 1989-90. On Thursday, Barcelona can break it when it travels to Rayo Vallecano, and three days later it will play at Eibar in the Basque region.
These are teams that F.C. Barcelona, with its phenomenal front three of Lionel Messi, Luis Suárez and Neymar, are expected to blow away. But Barcelona knows better than to travel to either club and be complacent. Because with the so-called little clubs, whose stands will be filled with fans imploring players to press and force an upset, complacency would be folly.
And, again, Bartomeu hopes to suffer for the points. “We can lose,” the club president said during an interview last week before the Arsenal game. “We lost a lot of titles in the last 10 years, and we have to make La Liga more competitive.”
He paused before adding, “We don’t fear anything in Spain. Our biggest opponent is not a single club, it is the Premier League in England.”
By that, he means he is fighting the perception — especially in the huge commercial markets in the Americas and Asia — that the English league is better than all and merits the billions in television revenue that it receives, more than any other league. England’s clubs — on the field, at least — are not better than Barcelona (the current Champions League titleholder) or Real Madrid or Bayern Munich or Juventus or Paris St.-Germain.
But where England reaps popularity is from the excitement of its competitive structure. Bartomeu is an admirer of the way that Leicester City has shot from lingering in last place one year ago to sitting proudly in first place today.
“The football that Leicester is playing is wonderful to watch,” he said.
Bartomeu appreciates not just that Leicester’s team has foreign (Thai) ownership that allows it to field a competitive team, but also that the club benefits from a television deal that pays each Premier League team an equal share from both domestic and overseas deals.
Barcelona has operated under a different model. It does not have a corporate owner, but 140,000 members (known as “socios”) who pay annual fees — often for life — for the privilege of owning a piece of the club. That money helps pay for things — as do sponsorship deals with Nike and Qatar, among other things — but a large chunk of annual revenue comes from television deals. Up until now, Barcelona and Real Madrid have negotiated separate TV deals from the rest of the Spanish clubs, giving them revenues that dwarf everyone else.
But starting this summer, the big two clubs in Spain have agreed to sacrifice part of that massive financial advantage. Bartomeu, who was re-elected by club members last year, admitted he had problems explaining this to his own father.
“My father is an economist,” Bartomeu said. “He is still active in his own company, and he says to me ‘Look son, we want to win. Why sacrifice our financial advantage?’ ”
Bartomeu tried to explain that the agreement to pool broadcast revenues is not a gift to the smaller clubs. Rather, it is an investment — a short-term pain for long-term gain.
Real Madrid and Barcelona agreed to a three-year agreement. The two clubs — who obviously are the biggest attractions for the broadcasters — will each get 17 percent of the overall TV income, Bartomeu said, and he expects that to fall just short of the 160 million euros, or about $175 million, that his club currently receives from its television income.
For the other teams, the new deal means they will receive far more television money. Some of those — like Barcelona’s neighbor, Espanyol, and Atlético Madrid and Valencia — are already benefiting from overseas investors and have more to spend on players. But Bartomeu said all of La Liga will benefit from the new broadcast deal.
He constantly reminded me that he is not the owner of Barcelona. “We are a board of 21 persons, who employ, on behalf of the 140,000 socios, Messi and Neymar and Suárez, but also Iniesta, Busquets, and so on,” the club president said. “Barça, we all say, is more than a club, from the players at the top to the youngest child in our academy. We have a historic memory.”
To grow Barcelona’s image abroad, Bartomeu jets around the world. His board opened an F.C. Barcelona office in New York, a Barcelona school in India and one in Indonesia, and it is renewing its association with Unicef, for which Barcelona pays €2 million a year, through 2020.
It is, he insisted, not all about money. Manchester City, bankrolled by the royal family of Abu Dhabi, has been described as Barça II. It is run by former Barcelona employees, is building an academy based on the Catalan club’s principles and has hired Pep Guardiola, the former Barcelona coach, to take over after this season.
“Let’s see if Pep can do in Manchester what he did for us,” Bartomeu said with a broad smile. “Pep came through our school. He was coached by Johan Cruyff, and going back even further, the blueprint was laid down by another Dutchman, Rinus Michels.”
But players win games, and Barcelona is not afraid to spend handsomely for top talent.
“Our main objective is not to make money,” Bartomeu emphasized. Money it takes in is turned around for the talent on the field so it can win — with style.
Senior players have their say. Two years ago, when Barcelona paid more than $100 million to buy out Suárez’s contract with Liverpool, many asked why the Catalan club needed another striker.
Bartomeu said last week that Messi told the club he wanted to play deeper, to be a more complete team player. When Sevilla led, 1-0, at the Camp Nou on Sunday, it was Messi who stepped up to tie the score with a trademark free kick. A Barcelona team player.
Source: NY Times
