Josep Maria Bartomeu is willing to take his deserved reputation as a subject to the extreme resilient. The storms they happen around the club but the president does not abandon, even when he himself considered the possibility of doing it ten days ago, at the time when the validation of the signatures presented by the promoters of the vote of no confidence it presaged a negative outcome for the board and once the transfer market was closed. Bartomeu did not rule out then raising the idea of resign and he thought about today, after the weekend with a bridge and already with the vote of no confidence presumably confirmed as it has been, to gather his directors and debate the matter. When the time comes, the aforementioned meeting has not been held, nor will it be held at the moment. The board members, who attend their leader’s movements at times as mere spectators, are still waiting for his call.
The topics to be discussed are numerous and all transcendent. The first is the aforementioned resignation. There is internal division here. There are supporters of leaving, fed up with a situation they consider agonizing, but there are also those who are still suspicious of the signatures obtained by the group More than a motion , architects of a perfectly legal motion to be blessed by the voting table. Discussion is envisaged here, not only when deciding whether to resign or resist accepting the challenge of a vote of no confidence in which the survival in the box the member will decide, but above all because of the supposed deterioration of the internal functioning: the complaint and subsequent complaint to the Civil Guard By the club’s legal services, warning of signs of irregularity in some firms was never discussed at the board, so many managers found out about it through the media. The supporters of continuing believe that it is essential to control the financial year until the end to mitigate losses that, with little income, are again expected to be very high. They consider that they are the ones who should lead the spending control measures, including the negotiation process with the players to cut salaries.
The decision
The directors are still waiting for the president’s call to debate whether they resign or face the vote of no confidence
Once the meeting is held, assuming that no manager breaks the deck and assuming that the conclusion of the meeting is to continue and not resign, the club will begin to work on the next steps to take.
The date of the vote of no confidence is increasingly defined: it would be the weekend of October 31 and November 1. Club executives, who must stay away from the noise from the executive rooftop, will focus this week on developing the corresponding protocol to adapt to the conditions established by the Secretary of Sport of the Generalitat, in turn with the health authorities to ensure the safety of voters. This is how Gerard Figueras, its top manager, expressed himself in a recent interview in The vanguard . “An election or a vote of no-confidence can be done if not all the people gather in a single day at the Camp Nou. You can use the entire territory, for example, installing … I don’t know, 15 different polling stations. You do not concentrate all the partners and you can comply with the measures derived from the pandemic ”. Figueras thus contradicted Román Gómez Pontí, head of Barcelona’s legal services, who had assured that holding a vote of no confidence today was equivalent to transgressing the law.
The role and influence of the executives that Bartomeu has surrounded himself with is one of the points of friction with some sector of the board, a minority because the dissidents have all left.
