Barcelona: two decades of sporting success between courts, prisons and revenge

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"They also crucified Jesus Christ."

Barcelona's presidential chair always had an intoxicating effect on those who managed to seize it.

, who made himself equal to

during his 22-year reign (1978-2000), he had the bad idea of ​​buying a television in the Quatre Camins prison commissary.

There he was serving a sentence together with his son for bribing tax inspectors.

And he could not understand the histrionic activity that that television revealed from the very first hour.

As if people didn't have more important things to do in the morning than watch talk shows.

He himself said that he had spent half his life working his ass off for a Barcelona that had to get rid of its complexes regarding the power of Madrid and Madrid.

That it had to acquire the sporting and economic importance for decades denied.

«I could have eaten caviar and Barça had gone into debt.

But I was in a taxi and ate herring.

Núñez celebrated his 1978 electoral victory by dipping cupcakes in the café con leche and going to mass.

Some of those investigated for the

, such as the former Barça president

, mark the years of

as the starting point for the payments to the former number two of the referees.

A time when

was a lieutenant.

The first invoices accredited to Negreira correspond to the agonizing presidency of Gaspart (2000-2003).

He was the last great Barça leader to receive a massive boo from the fans at the Camp Nou.

Perhaps because the stadium, whose structural deterioration invites the metaphor, has hardened its skin before two decades in which Barcelona has been wasting away in court.

It has been 20 years in which three presidents (

and the

and Josep Maria Bartomeu), together with their armies of sycophants (from the cakes of

de Núñez they went to anonymous Twitter accounts as a method of intimidating journalists), have united their fate in court.

governed on the pitch

, leaders more concerned with reaching and retaining power did so in the box.

In being part of Catalan civil society with the Barça pin as bait.

Although for that they had to skin themselves and surrender to revenge.

The

it is the rotten and uncut umbilical cord of an age.

A time in which the partner, no matter how much he was involved in the motions of censure and in the electoral processes, could never be more than a client and spectator.

"We will put an end to the director of the cigar!" Laporta shouted shortly before taking over the presidency of Barça in 2003, when the regeneration of an entity that Gaspart left on the brink of bankruptcy should begin, and that Núñez had managed as if he were taking care of a piggy bank.

Young people raised in business schools where failure is not allowed, desk mates, and creators of brilliant ideas (such as the "virtuous circle" inaugurated with

) arrived.

But they were too ambitious to live together in peace.

Rosell, his good friend Bartomeu, and also

, executive director of Manchester City since 2012, were part of that first meeting of Laporta.

Laporta's first management team split in June 2005. Rosell, outraged because his president ignored him and preferred to pay more attention to

, resigned along with Bartomeu,

and

.

And the dirty war began.

On October 19, 2006, Judge Roberto García Ceniceros sentenced Laporta to call elections "immediately" for breach of the statutes.

His mistake was to start his mandate on June 22, 2003, eight days before the end of the year, something that the plaintiffs took advantage of to claim that those eight days, according to the previous Magna Carta, corresponded to one year in office.

The mystery of the retired partners

Who signed that complaint?

A 75 year old retired partner.

.

Shirtless, he defined himself as a "

" in an interview with

.

He assured that "two lawyers" convinced him at the gates of the Camp Nou to go to court.

, his wife, did not know anything.

She found out when she saw the journalist in the hall.

All that led to an even more sordid and bizarre episode.

, also a retired partner, this 70-year-old, filed another complaint against the Laporta board of directors.

He accused him of going to the 2006 elections without having endorsed alleged losses of 63.8 million, an amount generated, precisely, during the first eight days of his term in 2003. In the trial, Vicenç Pla had serious difficulties explaining in what way consisted of an endorsement and what was denounced.

Pla never came to request the execution of the judgment of the Court, despite agreeing with him in 2010.

That was the year in which Rosell managed to return to the club, this time as president and after a long battle in the shadows.

And he started another long process.

Rosell, despite taking refuge in the white cardboard of neutrality, used the club's flag to convince the members and take a social responsibility action against Laporta and his board of directors for the alleged economic waste of his first term (47.3 million euros). euros of losses, despite the fact that the judge confirmed that, in reality, the mandate had been closed with a profit of four million).

Such was the care with which that matter was treated that the audit commissioned by Rosell, where by the way nothing was said about the invoices that were paid to Negreira, did recreate a ticket of 24 euros for the purchase of some chickens in the

.

The case was not closed until May 2017, just when Sandro Rosell began his 643-day journey in preventive detention, accused -and later acquitted- of laundering 20 million for the audiovisual rights of the Brazilian team.

The pharmacist's complaint

Both Rosell and Bartomeu, meanwhile, were cleared of all charges in the

.

In return, they led Barcelona by the hand to its first conviction as an institution in history for tax fraud (5.5 million fine).

The origin was a lawsuit filed in the National Court by

, a pharmacist from Olesa de Montserrat who, until then, was only known for repudiating Qatar's sponsorship on the shirt.

Before Rosell resigned (January 2014) and cleared the way for Bartomeu, he filed a lawsuit against Ferran Soriano and the former CEO

for "fraudulent administration and discovery and disclosure of secrets" during Laporta's tenure.

, former head of security,

was also investigated .

The Método-3 detective agency was commissioned to spy on opponents such as Rosell, its own managers or even players (

among them).

The case was archived.

The club withdrew the accusation for those espionage invoices (2.4 million).

Laporta could always boast of never having been sentenced by a judge.

In 2011, a lawsuit by the agent

, who claimed 2.5 million euros in commissions from Laporta for operations in Uzbekistan, was dismissed.

Laporta acknowledged in the trial having collected 10.15 million through his law firm for advising the Uzbek magnate Miradil Djalalov.

In the Negreira case, the Prosecutor's Office can only summon Laporta as a witness, having prescribed the payments of his mandate.

Bartomeu, pointed out again along with Rosell, slept in the cells of the Mossos de Les Corts police station in March 2021 after the outbreak of Barçagate

a cybernetic plot for which the former president would have paid to discredit anyone who could make him uncomfortable.

One of the companies that he invoiced was registered in a caravan parked in an open field in Uruguay.

The producer Jaume Roures has managed to bring Bartomeu to trial for slander, but the main case is still under investigation.

Núñez told his partners that no one could fool them.

And Gaspart corrected: «I lie... But little».

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