"I want to be president of Barça"

Joaquim Carandell (Manlleu, 1994) has been president of Unión Deportiva Tona for ten years now. In fact, he took office at just 21 years old, after being offered the position of president of a club that already had the main sponsorship of the family business. Benito Urban, dedicated to manufacturing street furniture: playgrounds, benches, streetlights, railings, and manhole covers, among many other products. "Out of innocence and recklessness," he admits, he accepted the challenge while studying business administration in Barcelona, despite realizing that he had a heavy responsibility ahead of him. However, his involvement with the club and the emotional bond with the town where he's lived since he was ten years old pushed him to take the reins of an organization that was then playing in the First Catalan League. A decade later, Tona has accumulated four seasons in the Third Federation, the fifth tier of Spanish football, and has already established itself as the top club in the Osona region.

The label of "the son of"—due to the business ties—was a burden from the beginning, but Carandell wanted to shed them after his commitment to the organization. In fact, he stopped playing with the reserve team and founded a third team in the bottom tier to avoid conflicts of interest. This allowed him to work from within with greater freedom and earn respect. Since then, he has tried to project a rigorous club model, rooted in the people and with a professionalized structure: from 100 spectators per game, he has gone down to around 400, with a budget of around 200,000 euros. "You can't lose control of the desire to win: you have to know how to maintain balance," he says, aware of the financial risks involved in leading a sports club.

Although he doesn't feel fatigued, he doesn't hide the fact that he would like to find a replacement with the same dedication. "I never plan to abandon Tona. I am who I am thanks to the club. But I don't expect to still be president in 20 years," he confesses.

Beyond Tona, Carandell analyzes Catalan football with a critical eye. "It's hard to see stadiums of these categories packed with people. You go to cities like Badalona or L'Hospitalet and there are a thousand spectators," he argues. He also believes the subsidy system is broken, with institutions disconnected from the reality of small clubs and fierce competition for scarce resources. Therefore, he argues that more institutional involvement is needed and that support from the business community is vital, but insufficient without structural changes.

From Tona to Barça?

The future? He doesn't hide his desire to lead more ambitious projects, whether at club or federation levels, although he still sees it as a long way off: "This is helping me develop." He knows that leading teams—both at a sporting and business level—is key. And, between the lines, he lets slip his greatest desire: "I'm a member of Espanyol, but I want to be president of Barça." A phrase that, far from sounding contradictory, illustrates a family history: "My father made me a Barça member when I was little because he didn't want me to suffer what he suffered with Espanyol." However, the family also ended up buying Barça membership cards. But he's clear about it: he's a Barça fan and would like to work for the Blaugrana entity.

In any case, he knows that aspiring to the Barça box entails taking the risk that many others have experienced: ending up assuming legal, criminal, or judicial responsibility. But he doesn't rule anything out. If he's proven anything, it's that his ambition knows no bounds. Meanwhile, in Tona, he'll focus on growing from the ground up and, in the short term, on making a town of 8,500 inhabitants dream of a possible promotion to the Second Federation, the fourth tier of Spanish football.