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FC Barcelona's presidential candidate, Víctor Font, has set himself the primary goal for the next term to restore the link between the members and the stadium and leave the days of it regularly being at 75-77% capacity behind since more than 10 seasons ago. Before the pandemic, at every match, there were, on average, over 20,000 unoccupied seats. To turn the situation around, Sí al futur will implement policies to pack the Camp Nou full of new members.
The more than 12,000 people on the waiting list to obtain a season ticket and the other members who do not have a seat at the Camp Nou are the priority of Víctor Font. Therefore, they will have preference over third parties when enjoying the Stadium. In this sense, the commitments are:
With a loyalty program, their presence will be encouraged with a reduction in the annual price of season tickets for members who attend the Stadium, Johan Cruyff and the Palau, among other promotions.
Sí al futur will implement other initiatives to fill the facilities of members and to reward those who support the team in the stands and on trips more often:
In parallel with these measures, work will be done with the other clubs on reciprocal and bilateral agreements to obtain financial income for the fans who travel with the team.
Putting the members at the heart of the Club’s governance model: it is on the basis of that core principle that Sí al Futur (“Yes to the Future” in Catalan) will increase member participation in FC Barcelona, with a view to turning the Club into a more democratic organisation with greater commitment to social issues. To achieve that goal, Sí al Futur will, if it wins the elections, push for the setting-up of electronic voting, create new channels for communicating with members, and promote support for and the modernisation of supporters’ clubs and associations. In line with what he had already explained during the presentation of the financial programme, Víctor Font has reasserted that Sí al Futur represents a guarantee that the members will remain the owners of the Club and will exercise that ownership, which will prevent the Club’s current critical financial position resulting in it being turned into a public limited company. The two people entrusted with leadership of the Social unit will be Marc Duch and Antoni Rovira.
Marc Duch (member 84,283) will, as a Club executive, contribute to modernising, democratising and transforming FC Barcelona’s social projects. He will also provide the link between the Club and the various unofficial supporters groups that coexist among the fanbase. “We are proposing to promote dialogue between the Club and its members, making them central to the organisation. We want to change Barça’s governance model, and make it so that its owners are listened to and take part in the social fabric of the Club”, explains Marc Duch.
Sí al Futur takes the view that modernising the Club will also involve a comprehensive revision of its articles of association, with the clear goal of adapting them to the social and technological reality of the 21st century, and equipping them with the tools available in the modern day. As such, a very wide range of changes will be made, the following being some particularly important points:
1. Term reduction to four years
2. Reform of the make-up of the Delegate Members’ Assembly
3. Overhaul of internal mechanisms and bodies to democratise them and make them fully operational
With that in mind, Víctor Font stresses that Sí al Futur “will work towards scrapping the guarantees system (Board members have to guarantee 15% of the Club’s budget from their own funds), and making it easier for Board membership to be based on the experience and capabilities of the people who make it up, rather than exclusively on how deep their pockets are”.
Víctor Font considers it essential to bring back the link between members and the stadium by setting in train effective policies to fill the Camp Nou with members. To that end, Sí al Futur will set up a loyalty programmefor season ticket holders and will offer advantages for those going to matches as a family. It will also, to the greatest extent possible, streamline the allocation of seats to members who do not have a season ticket but are on the waiting list for one. Members without a season ticket will also enjoy priority access to ticket purchases.
The system of benefits for members regarding activities and discounts relating to the Club and its products will be promoted and expanded; the aim is to make it so that proudly wearing Barça gear every day isn’t as big a financial sacrifice as it currently is.
The general policy will shift towards giving the Club a catalogue of attractive services for members, with a view to involving members in the daily life of the Club and really putting them at the heart of it. With that in mind, programmes will be created to enable members without season tickets to access the Camp Nou, the Palau Blaugrana and the Johan Cruyff Stadium under favourable conditions.
If Sí al Futur wins the elections, voting processes and referenda will not be the only ways in which members will be able to participate. “We will hold periodic meetings with members of the Club, of official supporters’ clubs and of supporters groups and listen to their proposals and share information with them”, explains Víctor Font.
In addition, a Working Fund will be created for members, in order to feed Barça with Culé professionals and create a network of professional contacts between members. In view of this, Sí al Futur will bolster the body of volunteers to work on projects run by the Foundation or partner bodies.
Sport will play a central role in the participation of ordinary fans, with the creation of members’ leagues for various sports and age categories, and with the setting-up of a network of gyms run by the Club.
Sí al Futur is also committed to strengthening and looking after all supporters’ clubs, and everything that Barça supporters’ clubs and associations represent, such as the supporters’ clubs themselves, the Casal de l’Avi (a club for retired members) and the Agrupació Barça Jugadors (retired players’ club). Antoni Rovira (member 40,705) will be the Board member responsible for supporters’ clubs and relations with supporters’ associations.
With that in mind, the Sí al Futur programme includes over 50 initiatives, each contributing to one of five overarching goals:
1. the financial sustainability of the supporters’ clubs
2. the fostering of diversity, participation and democracy in the supporters’ clubs
3. improved proposals to supporters’ club members
4. a new model: from the supporters’ clubs of before to the centres and embassies of the future
5. relations and cooperation with the country’s associations network
Furthermore, in order to give the supporters’ clubs and associations more of a voice and greater weight, the Board member responsible for this area will attend and fully participate in all Board meetings.
1. Name:
Antoni Rovira
2. Date and place of birth:
60 years old, Barcelona
3. Professional field and noteworthy experience:
Business owner
4. My link to Barça:
My father was a Barça member in the 1940s and 1950s. I’ve been going to the Camp Nou on the membership cards of family members since I was little. I am member number 40,705 (since 1990 – Johan Cruyff and his “Dream Team” drew me into the stadium). My seat is along the side of the stadium, second stand back. In my family, all four of us are members: my wife, my two kids and me.
5. What type of Culé are you?
Positive and calm on the outside, can’t bear to watch on the inside. I respect the referees and the opposition, though I never want Real Madrid to win.
6. Our slogan means “Yes to the Future”. What do you think is the thing
Barça need to improve most urgently in your field?
Giving Barcelona fans hope and pride in winning again.
Reinvigorating and modernising the supporters’ club model for the 21st century and, at the same time, growing the supporters’ club movement.
7. Do you have a couple of suggestions for those rare times when we are
thinking of something other than Barça?
Three things:
Reading books is the best window you can open for getting to know the world and the human condition.
Doing sport is good medicine for staying healthy and in balance.
Living in nature (sea and mountains) is learning to love it. In my case, one of my passions is to go mushroom-picking in the forest. The other is going out in a boat to contemplate the beauty of the sea and of our landscape,
which we must protect.
The financial programme of Sí al Futur (“Yes to the Future” in Catalan) is designed to raise sufficient funds to avoid the need for FC Barcelona to be converted into a public limited company (PLC), and to enable the Club to remain fully competitive for European trophies, while applying aspects of the governance programme, such as strengthening the departments responsible for sports other than football and reducing fees for the members who go to the most games at the Camp Nou.
At the presentation of Sí al Futur’s financial programme, at midday today in Barcelona, the precandidate for the Club Presidency, Víctor Font, underscored that “Our plan should, by the end of our term, enable the Club to post a profit of €100 to 200 million, allowing us to strengthen the team and ensure that Barça remains in the hands of the members”.
At the event, Mr Font warned that “Barça’s fragile financial state, combined with the extremely intense competition and the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, is forcing the Club to rethink its financial structure and to equip itself with all the tools required for it to operate as profitably as possible”. As an emergency measure to tackle the Club’s financial crisis, Sí al Futur will, during the first 100 days, implement a plan to balance the profit and loss account for this season and will refinance the debt maturing this summer. At the same time, Mr Font explained, the Club’s finances will be shored up with a plan of “rational management of expenditure and new revenue streams that will enable us to bring in €1.4 billion by the end of the term, post a profit of between €100 and 200 million, and remove the risk that Barça will cease to be owned by its members and become a PLC”.
To increase revenues and profits, Sí al Futur plans to monetise the 400 million Barça supporters around the world; in other words, it proposes to sell new products and services to those fans directly, cutting out the middleman. The precandidacy has worked out three very detailed action plans in this regard: one for audiovisual content, one for merchandising/e-commerce and another for gaming/e-sports, with precontracts in place with key strategic partners in each area. Future Board members have been lined up who are leading lights in these fields, including Luis de Val, José Manuel Villanueva, Iñaki Ecenarro, Oscar Pierre and Manel Sarasa; the precandidacy also has agreements on consultancy work in place with other experts in relevant areas, such as Carlota Pi (bios of all the newly announced contributors can be found at the end of this press release).
With that in mind, Víctor Font stressed that “We will be moving towards Barça being a ‘total Club’ that goes beyond traditional football and becomes a key player in the global entertainment industry. It will be a Club where content production contributes to success on the pitch and vice versa”. Furthermore, implementation of the plan will be in the hands of an executive team of the utmost reliability, selected during the course of work on the precandidacy over the last seven years. It will be led by “a top-notch CEO: a Catalan Culé with experience of technology, telecommunications and managing profit and loss accounts worth millions of dollars”, Mr Font spelled out.
Víctor Font considers the new Camp Nou and the new Palau Blaugrana “an urgent and unavoidable necessity” and is committed to doing everything possible to bringing them to fruition in the next term. Of course, before taking the final step, Sí al Futur will review the exact current situation of the Espai Barça project – both the architectural plans and the financing agreement with Goldman Sachs – in order to explain it transparently to members and, if necessary, adapt it to the Club’s current needs, opportunities and capacities, before putting it to another referendum. “We will promote a viable Espai Barça that does not jeopardise the members’ ownership of the Club but does enable us to continue competing at the elite level. If either of these two conditions is not backed up by the figures, we will not launch any project that would mortgage our future and endanger the Club as we understand it today”, stressed the precandidate.
All the new Board members being proposed by Víctor Font to run the Club in the first term have now been introduced. The directors announced today are:
Xavier Carbonell (Barcelona, 1970) – member 97,552. An executive director with a great deal of experience in the medical devices industry, specialising in change management, marketing, biotechnology and health, he will bring financial and business knowledge to the Board of Directors.
Iñaki Ecenarro Iturrioz (Errenteria, 1973) – Member 85,968. An entrepreneur and investor in technology companies who founded the standard-setting tech start-up Trovit, he will offer the Board knowledge of the worlds of finance, business and new technologies.
Oscar Pierre Miquel (Barcelona, 1992) – member 58,434. An aerospace engineer, and the founder and CEO of Glovo, he will bring financial and business knowledge to the Board.
Manel Sarasa i Serra (Girona, 1971) – member 81,480. An industrial engineer and serial entrepreneur, and the cofounder and CEO of Wine is Social, he will offer the Board knowledge of the strategy, finance and digital worlds.
Joaquim Uriach Torelló (Barcelona, 1966) – member 9,430. Chair of the Uriach pharmaceutical conglomerate will bring financial and institutional knowledge to the Board.
Luis de Val Mínguez (Barcelona, 1979) – member 41,480. Founder and CEO of YouPlanet, and an expert in the production and distribution of audiovisual and entertainment content, he will bring knowledge of the audiovisual, entertainment and social media fields to the Board.
José Manuel Villanueva Villalba (Barcelona, 1976) – member 36,622. The cofounder of Privalia and 011h, he will offer the Board knowledge of the financial and digital fields.
The Board will also receive consultancy services on financial and innovation matters from Carlota Pi (Barcelona, 1976). She is an engineer and entrepreneur, and founder and director of energy supplier Holaluz, which started the process of being listed on the BME Growth stock exchange in 2019. While she has been in charge, Holaluz has signed agreements with producers of clean energy generated from hydroelectric, solar, biogas and geothermal plants, and has obtained green energy certificates from the Spanish National Energy Commission (CNE).
A robust, rigorous, carefully crafted, ambitious and participative project, its origins date back to 2013, when Víctor Font foresaw the “perfect storm” for FC Barcelona and started laying the groundwork for the Club to face a post-Messi future with a degree of certainty. Història d’un somni: imaginant el futur Barça (Story of a Dream: Imagining a Future for Barça) is a documentary summing up those years, which saw the emergence and development of a project to make it possible for Barça to keep competing at the highest level in all competitions and for ownership of the Club to remain in the hands of its members.
This film – a first for an FC Barcelona precandidacy – includes conversations between Víctor Font and Antoni Bassas, Juli López, Toni Nadal, Ramon Cugat and other members of the Sí al futur (“Yes to the Future” in Catalan) Board.
The documentary is 38 minutes long and shows meetings with future Board members outlining the project; Sí al futur’s multiple presentations to Barça members and fans in Catalonia; the campaign run by Víctor Font to gather some 5,000 members’ signatures in support of adding electronic voting to the agenda for the 2019 Delegates’ Meeting, with a view to making the Club more participatory; and a more personal section on Víctor Font, in which we find out about his passion for Barça and plans for the Club’s future.
This Monday evening, Sí al futur volunteers and employees will attend an exclusive première at Screen 9 of Bosque Multicines. At 19:00 on Thursday, 9 January – at Bosque Multicines again – there will be an exclusive première for the first 150 members to sign up for the screening. After the screening, the audience will be able to discuss the documentary with Víctor Font in person.
You can register through the Sí al futur website: www.sialfutur.cat. From 20:00 onwards on Thursday 7th, the documentary will be publicly accessible through the same website.
The film was made by the documentary maker Martí Genís i Bardolet. A freelance film editor and producer mainly working in documentaries and journalism, he founded the production company Pospotime in 2012. Martí Genís has been following Víctor Font and the Sí al futur team for the last few years, documenting the project.
Sí al Futur [Yes to the Future, in Catalan] has made public the ambitious sports project that it will implement at FC Barcelona in the event of winning the elections on January 24. An organization chart thought and designed in detail by the team led by Víctor Font jointly and with the approval of Xavi Hernández in the case of football. In fact, the former Barça captain will be the general manager of football. The new sports organization that Sí al Futur and Xavi Hernández have devised intends to recover and retain the talent of the house and to weave a solid, innovative and rigorous sports structure in the offices to build a winning project on the playing field. The members of the organization chart have been chosen to ensure that all professionals complement each other and work in an environment of trust and stability.
Xavi Hernández will be accompanied by another Barça player, Jordi Cruyff, who will be the new soccer sports director. The Technical Secretariat will report to him and will be led by two highly experienced professionals. One of them will be Tito Blanco, a midfielder trained in the lower categories of the Club. Blanco, who has been Levante's sporting director and vice president of the Association of Spanish Footballers (AFE), will also help Joan Vilà and Albert Benaiges, who will lead grassroots football.
For the women's soccer teams, an identical structure has been formed, headed by Lluís Cortés.
The general director of Sports, Juli López, will coordinate five major areas that will cut across all the Club's sports disciplines:
1. Medical services
2. Physical preparation and physiotherapy
3. Behaviour and Psychology (Inma Puig)
4. Methodology (Joan Vilà and Paco Seirul·lo (football) and Àlex Terés (basketball))
5. Young talent management (Emili Ricart)
The expert psychologist in team training, research and development, Inma Puig, will be one of those responsible for the area of Behaviour and Psychology. Puig was a psychologist for FC Barcelona from the 2003-04 season to 2018. In this new stage, she will contribute her experience in all the Club's sports disciplines and at all levels of competition, from the first teams to the lower categories.
Toni Nadal, as a Club director, is committed to contributing his advice and knowledge in the creation of this new area. The former coach and uncle of the Majorcan tennis player Rafa Nadal will help to set the strategic lines of conduct that the players of FC Barcelona must follow in order to turn the Club into a worldwide point of reference. In the area of Behaviour, the incorporation of a former player is also planned to help in the management of the first team players.
In the Methodology area Sí al Futur will recover the experience of Joan Vilà, who will again join that of Paco Seirul·lo. Joan Vilà, discoverer and mentor of Xavi Hernández, was director of the Club's Methodology area and author of the manual of style of play and work methodology that has governed the entire base of Barça football. One of the main objectives of this area will be the creation of a Trainer Academy, aimed at training technical staff of the different Club teams.
These five areas will be applied transversally in football, in the professional and non-professional sections of the Club, both in the men's and women's teams.
Sí al Futur will replicate the structure of football in all sections of the Club. The will of Sí al Futur for the professional sections is clear: to strengthen the quarry to nurture the first teams with more home players, guarantee the leadership of the first teams in the home and European leagues, and create women's teams in each one of the sections.
For the basketball section Sí al Futur commits itself to Sarunas Jasikevicius. In fact, the project already had the Lithuanian coach in mind and interviewed him in 2019, before he actually signed for FC Barcelona.
The strategic objectives for this section are to strengthen the Methodology area and the scouting network to reinforce the lower categories and to be able to contribute more home-trained players to the first team.
The will of Sí al Futur for the handball section is for it to become a benchmark and be one of the favourite teams each year to win the EHF Champions League as has been the case this season. To achieve this, the project led by Víctor Font will entrust the team to David Barrufet and is committed to building the necessary structure to nurture the first team with home-trained players.
The roller hockey section will be the one to benefit from a more thorough reformulation. Sí al Futur will create its own training hockey school with the aim of nurturing players from the quarry to the first team, as well as exporting Barça talent to make this sport grow. The person in charge of this project will be Ferran "Nando" Pujalte, former player and former Club coach of proven experience.
The objective of Sí al Futur is for the futsal section to continue competing each year to win all the titles at stake. For this reason, it will intensify its commitment to a clearly defined model both in the first team and in the lower categories.
Sí al Futur will commit themselves firmly to the continuity of these sections. As part of the defined strategic plan, two new self-sufficient modalities will be introduced: synchronized swimming and chess.
1. Name:
Juli López Segú
2. Date and place of birth:
51 years old, Granollers (near Barcelona).
3. Education:
Degree in Business Administration and Management, and a Master's Degree from ESADE Business School.
4. Professional field and noteworthy experience:
I spent 21 years working as an executive in a well-known multinational, in the field of Commercial Management. Previously I was a professional soccer player for 11 years, spending 5 years at FC Barcelona (Barça B and first eleven), and also in other Spanish first and second division teams.
5. My link to Barça:
Barça has been our LIFE. We are the López Segú family, where the 3 brothers played in the Barça’s first team, and our father also played for Condal, in the Les Corts pitch. We are very Culés and we love the Club very much.
6. What type of Culé are you?
I am a Culé who loves to cheer the team, be positive and not at all "fanatic". In sport you have to compete and try to win always, but in an exemplary way. I am clear that soccer is a sport and therefore you can win and also lose.
7. Our slogan means "Yes to the future". What do you think is the thing Barça need to improve most urgently in your field?
At the level of the first team, without a doubt the Champions League, and at the Club level, we need to recover the Academy and that the first teams aspire to have the majority of players trained in it.
8. Do you have a couple of suggestions for those rare times when we are thinking of something other than Barça?
Listen to any type of music, each one the music they like, while cooking a good meal to share with family or friends.