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discarded candidates and an impossible dream

BarcelonaWith three weeks to go until one year has passed since the sudden resignation of Ferran Reverter, Joan Laporta’s Barça continues to explore the state market for senior executives to fill the general director vacancy on the club’s organizational chart. It is not a search that the Barcelona president is very excited about. In fact, in a recent interview with SER Catalunya, he himself spoke of postponing it until the end of the season, when the financing of the reform of the Camp Nou must be closed, among other things.

However, from his close circle of trusted people, they advise him day in and day out that in order to command a ship as complex as Blaugrana, he needs an executive right hand with more availability than the one provided by treasurer Ferran Olivé, who has assumed the in recent months the functions of CEO even though he does not pay to do so, since he is a manager and is prohibited by the statutes. That is why Laporta has had contacts in recent times (and will be open to having some in the future) with profiles that could fit in the highest position of the professional structure. Conversations to try to find a figure with the attributes of Joan Oliver, his ideal candidate and at the same time impossible, since he knows that bringing him back to Barça after the disappearance of Reus would be highly unpopular. In addition, he is of retirement age: he will be 68 years old.


Joan Oliver and Joan Laporta, in a press conference at Barça.

Two reputable economists

According to ARA, one of the candidates that Barça has surveyed during the search for a general manager is Tomás Varela, an executive with a very extensive career in the financial field. An economist by training, he held various positions of responsibility for almost three decades at Banco Sabadell after jumping into the business arena in the 1980s with the auditor PriceWaterhouseCoopers and in the 1990s with the German insurer Allianz. Currently, after leaving Sabadell in March 2021, he is an independent director of the Swiss bank Julius Baer and at the end of November he was appointed director of Aena to replace Josep Antoni Duran i Lleida. Varela was flattered by Barça’s offer, but refused to make the jump to Camp Nou due to work incompatibilities.

Another of the candidates that Laporta had in his portfolio was Agustín Cordón, former vice president and former financial director of Bimbo in Spain and former CEO of both Grupo Zeta (2015-2019) and Mobile World Capital Barcelona (2012-2015). Graduated in economics and business from the University of Barcelona, ​​since July 2021 he is the president of the new-build real estate developer Culmia. Barça discarded his profile because it saw him in some aspects as too similar to Reverter, who folded due to irreconcilable differences of opinion with Laporta.

The Barcelona manager has also studied internally promoting some of the positions in the current organizational chart, such as Xavier Budó (sports area), Àlex Barbany (former head of new revenue now relocated to Espai Barça), Josep Maria Messeguer (BLM) or Maribel Meléndez (corporate area), but none of these paths have crystallized.

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