BarcelonaIn the absence of the legendary Leo Messi and Sergio Ramos, who will be watching it from Paris, old traditions will be revived this Sunday in the first classic of the 21/22 season. First of all, the presence of the public at the Camp Nou, which has not been subject to any capacity restrictions for a week and will record the best attendance of what we bring from exercise at a very favorable time – another thing is that s ‘fill to the brim. Barça-Madrid will also have a prologue in which they will play The laborers: this is marked by the protocols when the party is chaired at the box office by the highest institutional representative of Catalonia, something that has not happened since 2015. And it is that Pere Aragonès will occupy the usual seat of Joan Laporta, who will also host Florentino Pérez, the highest white president, for the first time since he regained the Barça government.
The fit between the two most mediated presidents of state football will be generously photographed because it has not occurred in these circumstances for 12 years. You have to go until November 29, 2009 to find the last precedent, with Guardiola and Pellegrini on the benches of both teams. Ibrahimovic resolved in favor of the local team the first classic of Cristiano and Benzema, who had landed at the Santiago Bernabeu as the main pillars of Florentino’s second project at Real Madrid, started without going to the polls after a tumultuous term of three years of Ramón Calderón.
That classic of 2009, that of Ibrahimovic and Guardiola, prior to the achievement of the famous sextet, was the last that Laporta lived at the Camp Nou in his first trip as president of Barça. More than a decade later, with more wrinkles and gray hair, the Barcelona lawyer is reunited at the Aristides Maillol market with Florentino, for whom the years have also passed, after having regained the reins of the Barcelona club in a context of crisis and decline. 30,000 members trusted him to reverse the drift of the entity with the determination he exhibited in his first government (2003-2010), in which he stood as a scourge of Madridism. His uncomplicated Catalan-oriented style and his vision when it came to approaching the business, going to the transfer market or getting complicity in the corridors embittered Florentino, who with him in the Catalan presidency could not celebrate neither leagues nor Champions in Cibeles. Laporta capitalized on this memory by placing a giant canvas next to the Bernabéu. “Looking forward to seeing you again,” it read. The strategy was noticed in the elections of this March 7th.
A canvas with no real consequences, for now
However, seven months after going to the polls, the mockery has not exactly translated into a hotter rivalry. Quite the opposite: Florentino has become a key player, albeit in the background, in the first months of Laporta’s government. The white president is a necessary cooperator at a time of general upheaval in the football industry.
The clearest example of the tune is the Superliga, a project in which the two leaders go hand in hand with Andrea Agnelli, owner of Juventus. The creation of a new competition despite UEFA’s monopoly and against the criteria of state leagues is vital to understanding Laporta’s complicity with Florentino. The white president is the main promoter of the initiative and has a high income just to found it, money that Barça would also do well to get out of the financial impasse in which he is immersed.
Support for this business route is related to the refusal of the two greats of Spanish football to the funding that the League offers through the CVC fund, an interest-free injection that Laporta accepted in July because it allowed him to renew Leo Messi but ended up rejecting – as a result, the Argentine star left for PSG – at the request of its CEO, Ferran Reverter, and its vice-president and main endorser, Eduard Romeu. Both, according to various sources, alerted by Florentino, who is also a crucial figure in talks with the Spanish government to change the rules of guarantees. To ensure his government, Laporta and his board have two options: restructure the current guarantee (117 million) with other supports to compensate for the departure of Jaume Roures or aspire to pass a decree law before November 30, which is when the term ends. The second possibility requires the ability to influence the white president, with whom, incidentally, Romeu has met this week in Madrid, according to the newspaper Sport. The vice-president and his partner José Elías, Laporta’s endorser, are great admirers of Florentino. They share a business vision and an investment bank, Goldman Sachs, which is also in the middle of Barça’s main credit operations.
