Josep Maria Bartomeu: "Under what parameter am I the worst president in the history of Barça?"

BarcelonaJosep 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.

Why does he want to speak now?

— At the beginning, the new board started talking about a disastrous inheritance, about the economy... this has happened to all the boards of Barça. But I was surprised that they started talking about me again in these elections, five years later. [Laporta] He has justified many decisions taken by himself due to the inheritance. It's an excuse and I found it excessive. I wanted to explain myself.

What do you do today?

— Just like when I was president of Barça. In my company, Adelte, an engineering firm for ports and airports. I was previously the CEO and now I am the president. Being a director of Barça is a privilege, but you don't receive any income in return. Therefore, I had to work.

Has he returned to the Camp Nou since he resigned?

— Before the works, yes. Since they reopened it, no. At the Palau, yes.

What do people say?

— Some look at me with a scowl, others encourage me, someone asks me for a photo... Also on the street, there are people who recognize me and sometimes we stop to talk and even to disagree.

He is usually defined as the worst president in the history of Barça.

— It makes me laugh a lot when they say that. I would ask them: under what parameter? Because if it's by the sporting parameter, for example, in my six-year term I won thirteen titles. If it's by economic parameters, in six years I earned more than 100 million for Barça. And if it hadn't been for the pandemic, the elections would have been in June 2021 and the stadium renovation would probably have started.

During his term, fake accounts were created with club money to try to discredit opponents, journalists, and even players on the squad.

— This is not entirely true. In 2017, following Neymar's departure and around October 1st, there was a lot of noise on social media and conversations that Barça did not control. We had pressure from sponsors and commissioned a monitoring to know what was being said and to be able to develop our strategies. But the idea was always to do it with positive messages. It is not true that Barça decided to create fake profiles.

But they were created.

— This is in a judicial headquarters, in the investigation phase. I already explained and declared that I did not know that these profiles existed.

Do you regret hiring this service?

— No, because it was very important to know what is happening on social networks. In fact, Barça currently continues to carry out this monitoring.

Another controversial case. You stopped payments to Negreira when he stopped being vice-president of the CTA.

— This is not correct, I already declared it in court. We informed you that we decided to dispense with your services in March because we were restructuring the budget and wanted to do the reports internally. In addition, VAR was about to come in and we believed they were no longer needed. Negreira left the CTA later. The decision resulted in significant savings, because the price paid was high.

Did you never doubt the conflict of interest that Enríquez Negreira's company had?

— I found out later, when the father sent a registered letter. I asked what that was and they told me that, from the company Dasnil, one of the partners is Mr. Negreira. We didn't know, we thought it was the son's. All of this is quite difficult to explain, I understand.

Barçagate, Negreira, the forensic… has five open cases from his time as president.

— What strikes me as most curious is that in no case am I investigated for having enriched myself, but for mismanagement. This is unusual, because whenever someone is investigated for disloyal management, it is for having pocketed money. And that was not my case, evidently.

What is the most serious mistake you made as president?

— Perhaps Zubizarreta's dismissal. It felt bad to me. And also not having started to change the generation of players in 2019, after Liverpool.

Is the Barça of 2026 better or worse than the one from 2020?

— It depends. Sportingly, we have taken a leap forward. I am very happy that a generational change has taken place and that Flick has consolidated it. I applaud the current board for the first football team. On other club matters, I have disagreements.

In which ones?

— The economy, the relationship with partners, professional sports at the Palau, amateur sports... There are many shortcomings. These are things that regularly appear in the media.

Part of Laporta's criticism are the renewed contracts for Ter Stegen, Lenglet, De Jong and Piqué just before his resignation. According to Laporta, it heavily conditioned the club's economy.

— Let's look back. In March 2020, the lockdown begins and at that moment we have to close the club. Money stops coming in and a 14% reduction is agreed with the players, which means 90 million in savings. We speak with Procicat and they tell us that we will probably be able to reopen the stadium for the new season, but in August they tell us no. Then we speak with the players to tell them that their salary would be reduced by 20%. And here there is a clash of trains, because they say no. Therefore, we have to open a negotiation table. In parallel, we tell the players that whoever wants to can postpone payments until later, when the club recovers income. And there are only four who say "We want to do it, we want to help". A new contract is made for them in which they earn less in those first two years and will earn more in the last ones.

Regardless of covid, there had already been an upward trend in salaries for years. Do you think they overdid it with the renewals?

— It is true that the salary mass goes from 365 to 521 million in the 17-18 season with the renewals of Messi, Alba, Piqué and Busquets. But income also increased. It is evident that we were at the limit of fair play of the League, but we could afford it because the club was billing a lot.

From the outside, it seemed like they had lost control of the locker room.

— That is not true. It makes me laugh a lot because I have also heard that Messi was in charge, that the locker room decided; none of that is true. Obviously Messi had the right to say whatever he wanted, and surely he was in charge in the locker room, but not in the club.

Messi's renewal in 2017 was stratospheric. Does he regret having done it at that moment of nerves, after Neymar's departure?

— It was not a moment of nerves. It is true that there is a little fear that someone might want to touch Messi, who then had a clause of 400 million and it goes up to 700. And a renewal meant paying him more money to protect our main asset of the club.

How did Messi's express mail live?

— When he says he wants to leave, I explain clearly to him, his family, and his agents that it is impossible. That Barça needs him, not only from a sporting point of view; also economically. He wanted a release clause. In the end, he understood and stayed, hoping there would be a change in the 2021 elections.

But then they already had fair play problems and with their departure much salary mass would have been freed.

— I've always said that Messi was paid little for what he gave, both on a sporting and economic or commercial level. And he wasn't at the end of his sporting career: two years later he won the World Cup. I know that Messi would have loved to participate in the squad's renewal, with these young players that there are now, who are also part of this famous legacy. But they fired him and it couldn't be.

Was he fired or could they not renew him because of the inheritance?

— It's not the fault of the inheritance. It's the fault of fair play because the new board inflated the losses to 555 million. When La Liga receives it, they decide to do a second audit and believe the losses are not these, as there are provisions worth 283 million. But Barça decides to stick to its proposal, La Liga applies it, and the club loses a fair play that, to this day, it still hasn't recovered. If they had done what they were supposed to do, Leo Messi could have been perfectly renewed and players signed.

What do you think of the new Camp Nou?

— I'm glad we're back already, although there's still a lot of work to do. Regarding the project changes, which are to keep the first tier and redo the third, putting the vip boxes higher up... I think we'll define it better when it's completely finished.

Laporta justified the changes due to the 12,000 season ticket holders who had to move from the first to the third tier, and that the third tier had structural problems.

— This season ticket thing was already considered. If we made the first tier new it was to improve the inclination. In the last years of the mandate, we made all the people on the waiting list go to the third tier because we were saving a spot in the first and second to relocate the affected members. No one would have gone to the third tier, which, by the way, it's not true that it had structural problems. All I know is that the new board changed the project and it has gone from 830 million to 1,500... and we'll see if it's not more.

Why was a million and a half paid to Laietà for dust and noise, and they didn't explain it until SER uncovered it?

— In any modification of the metropolitan plan, a series of concessions and agreements are made, and with Laietà this agreement is reached. In fact, initially we wanted to buy the club's land, but they said no. Then they proposed a figure that we did not accept. And in the end, we reached this agreement. What happened is that at the time we could not say it because we were in joint negotiations with neighbors, businesses...

If the club belongs to the members, why are there so many confidentiality clauses? The complaint about Neymar's signing comes precisely because information was not given to a member.

— A member cannot say "Give me Neymar's purchase contract". Then all the information we would have at Barça would be public. Confidential information is basic to not give an advantage to opponents. I am sure that big clubs like Arsenal, Manchester United, Juve or PSG cannot give information to their members or shareholders.

In the Neymar case, they signed a plea agreement where the club admitted its guilt.

— It was a good decision for the club and a very bad one for Sandro [Rosell] and for me, because we had the Neymar 2 case behind us and it was harming us. The settlement of 5.5 million was signed because the lawyers assured us that the club would be condemned for 22.5 million, since the Tax Agency interpreted that the 40 million paid to the parents for the player's economic rights were salary and not a transfer.

Viewed from a distance, did you feel politically alone as president of Barça?

— Yes. There were 20 of us on the board and there were people from the right, from the left, some independentists, others not... It was very important to me that the decisions we made were not influenced by politics. This meant that many times we said no to things they asked us to do. By saying no, you gain a following of people who don't like what you're doing. Politically, we never had the coverage or protection of anyone. Nor the media protection of certain outlets that were more politicized. Quite the opposite. When things went wrong, they turned against us.