Josep Maria Bartomeu (Barcelona, 1963) arrived at the presidency of Barça with the resignation of Sandro Rosell in 2014. A year later, and thanks to a treble, he would win the elections by a landslide. But he could not exhaust his term, a victim of poor sporting results and the economic crisis derived from the coronavirus. He resigned in October 2020. Five and a half years later, he attends to ARA after declining to be interviewed on several occasions. He presents himself at the newsroom with documents to defend his economic management.

Barcelona's 16th investigating court has ordered the summons of former Barça president Josep Maria Bartomeu as a suspect following a complaint filed by Joan Laporta's board alleging he paid him millions in commissions for signings, including those of Antoine Griezmann and Malcom. According to ARA, based on information provided by The World, Bartomeu, former CEO Òscar Grau, and former head of legal services Román Gómez Ponti will testify as suspects on October 24. Former vice president of sport Jordi Mestre and another former general director of Barcelona, Nacho Mestre, will also appear as defendants on November 7. Lawyer José Ángel González Franco, who was involved in Griezmann's signing, will appear on December 4 alongside his partner Domingo Goenaga.

Sandro Rosell only testified for 15 minutes before the judge, but it was enough time to leave the main character of the day in court. "With Messi and Piqué at Barça, we didn't have to pay Negreira," the former Barça president declared, according to Efe, at the courthouse. It was an intense morning at the City of Justice in Hospitalet de Llobregat, which also saw the presence of another former Barça president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, and Javier Enríquez Romero, the son of José María Enríquez Negreira, the former vice president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA). Between father and son, Barça paid a total of 7.3 million euros between 2001 and 2018.

La Masia has always been a precious treasure for Barça. An identity based on investing in players trained in the youth academy that has taken Pep Guardiola, Lionel Messi, Xavi Hernández, Lamine Yamal and Pau Cubarsí to the elite.However, it also served as a way to raise money for players who don't have a place in the first team. Famous names like Àlex Valle, Nico González, and Ilaix Moriba have had to seek a place elsewhere in exchange for a transfer. This formula has generated close to €200 million over the last 10 years. Both Josep Maria Bartomeu (2015-2020) and Joan Laporta (2021-2025) have used La Masia to make ends meet. Now, a potential transfer for Marc Casadó, a situation the Vallecas native would like to avoid, would allow Laporta to surpass the €100 million mark in sales of youth-trained players during the current term.

It is easy to imagine the faces of the Barça employees who were already in Kobe and the journalists who were flying to Japan at that time to cover the Barça tour when The club announced on Wednesday that it would not be attending due to non-payment from the promoter, D-DriveThe same ones they probably posted this Thursday when they learned that Barça is once again considering traveling to Japan and playing Vissel Kobe on Sunday after Rakuten, the company selling the friendly tickets, took over the debt. Barça is then scheduled to fly to South Korea to play the other two friendlies scheduled for this tour.

January 2015. Barça is a powder keg. On the 5th, the team holds its traditional open training session at the Miniestadi with one notable absence. Leo Messi is absent. He claims gastroenteritis, but no one listens to his story, and it's interpreted as retaliation for having been a substitute the day before at Anoeta in their defeat to Real Sociedad. That same day, the sporting director, Andoni Zubizarreta, is dismissed after some of his statements were misinterpreted. The pressure was suffocating, and president Josep Maria Bartomeu, who had taken office a year earlier following the resignation of Sandro Rosell, announces he will call elections in the summer. Everyone thinks he has nothing to do. Not even he believes in victory. But, as football goes, the ball starts to roll in. Luis Enrique's Barça makes a comeback, and with Messi, Neymar, and Luis Suárez as a lethal trident, the team closes the season with a hat trick. League, Cup, and Champions League. Bartolomé is re-elected. This July 18th marks 10 years since an election that changed the club's history.

This May marks six years since one of the saddest nights in Barça's recent history. The team was on the brink of the Champions League final and was defending three goals away at Liverpool. But their fuses blew. grid came back with a 4-0 Which can be summed up by Origi's goal, who was left alone to finish off a corner kick delivered by Alexander-Arnold while the entire Barça defense was left reeling. Ter Stegen couldn't do anything. The goalkeeper is the only survivor in the Barça dressing room. That day he was joined in the starting lineup by Sergi Roberto, Piqué, Lenglet, Jordi Alba, Arturo Vidal, Busquets, Rakitic, Coutinho, Messi, and Suárez. On the bench were Cillessen, Semedo, Arthur, Malcom, Umtiti, Vermaelen, and Aleñá. The other first-team players who didn't travel were Todibo, Murillo, Rafinha Alcántara, Dembélé, and Kevin-Prince Boateng.

Gerard Piqué has reviewed in the programme La sotana in a satirical and sarcastic tone, a large part of Barça's current affairs in a relaxed way. Between jokes, Piqué has spoken on decisive moments of his career, before saying goodbye saying that he trusts that, this season, "the team will win something".

We already knew that Joan Laporta has a gift for oratory, especially if we compare him with his predecessor. Josep María Bartomeu shied away from microphones and press conferences because he was aware that it was not his thing. He stumbled, he ate syllables and his muddled speech even when reading a paper contributed to confusion and, why not say it, to mockery. But what has made him a bad president, a disastrous one, is his management, not his command of the stage. Because, for example, he did not bother to give explanations about 'Barçagate' and limited himself to sending out a communiqué assuring that the audit (which we later found out cost 600,000 euros) exonerated the club and ruled that no one had been ordered to defame anyone. Everything the other way round. And he wanted us to buy it.

The Mossos d'Esquadra (the Catalan police) believe that the disloyal administration of Josep Maria Bartomeu in relation with the Barçagate case is demonstrated, but they continue investigating why such a high amount of money was paid to I3 Ventures. They suspect that "managers, administrators, workers, or collaborators" could have received "considerations" for awarding contracts to this company. If one line of investigation is to know if the protagonists of the alleged crime would have committed it for personal interests, a second line would have a political interpretation.

Barçagate assails Josep Maria Bartomeu, who appears as a possible ideologist of the whole plot investigated in a report of the Mossos d'Esquadra that is part of the investigation of the case. The ex-president of Barça spent the night of Monday to Tuesday detained in the police station of Les Corts, alone in a prison cell, and was transferred in the morning to the Ciutat de la Justícia, where he refused to declare on the advice of his lawyers, since they had not been able to consult the investigation. 

Josep Maria Bartomeu, ex-president of Barça, and Jaume Masferrer, ex-chief of the club presidency's cabinet, are awaiting a court order after spending the night in Les Corts police station. The two have invoked their right not to testify and have been released with charges. This implies that the two remain under investigation for two alleged crimes of unfair administration and corruption between individuals as a result of the hiring of company I3Ventures, in exchange for one million euros, to create states of opinion on social networks favourable to the management of Bartomeu's board and contrary to players like Gerard Piqué or Leo Messi, presidential candidates Victor Font and Joan Laporta or businessmen like Jaume Roures.

Josep Maria Bartomeu has been arrested this Monday in Barcelona along with Jaume Masferrer, Òscar Grau and Román Gómez Ponti, three executives of his maximum confidence. The investigation believes they are involved in the Barçagate case, at the origin of the crisis that ended with Bartomeu exiting the club.

Barça is going through one of the worst moments in its history. The last years have been marked by a progressive degradation in all fields: in the sport field, in the economic field and in the no less important one of the values associated to the institution. Barçagate exploding again suddenly in the home stretch of the most atypical electoral campaign the club has ever had -because of how it has come by and the pandemic-, only reinforces this plummet in the prestige of a club affected by corruption and foul play by the management. A lousy management has squandered the sporting successes and the civic and social credibility. Barça has gone from touching the sky to being immersed in a deep and painful crisis. The end of Josep Maria Bartomeu is the end of an era, of a generation of leaders had the world at their feet and have ended in the worst way: the arrest of the former president and those who were his three trusted executives, interrogated by the Mossos throughout the day on charges of misuse of funds and corruption, illustrates the descent into hell. The Barça is touching rock bottom and it does so coinciding with critical moments for Catalan society.

Ysterday, the Catalan police arrested former president of Barça Josep Maria Bartomeu, former head of the club's presidency cabinet Jaume Masferrer, current CEO Òscar Grau, and head of legal Roman Gomez Ponti, as part of the investigation over "Barçagate". The investigating court number 13 of Barcelona provincial court involves them in an alleged crime of misuse of funds and corruption between individuals as a result of hiring company I3Ventures, in exchange for €1m, to create states of opinion on social networks favourable to the management of Bartomeu's board and contrary to players like Gerard Piqué or Leo Messi, Barça presidential candidates Víctor Font and Joan Laporta, or businessmen such as Jaume Roures.