Barcelona are held their General Assembly on Sunday morning, with the purpose of approving their budgets for the coming season, as well as the sale of assets made during the summer.
Joan Laporta thanked the fans for their support over the last 18 months since they had taken charge, highlighting the tricky financial situation they came into. In his own words, the club was in a state of collapse.
That was a large part of his point as he made a pitch to the members of the club in order to back the Superleague project, which Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus are still involved in. Marca provided a live stream of the press conference.
“The financial situation of football clubs is very worrying. The clubs assume all of the costs and all of the risks. 38 clubs from the Spanish league have had to mortgage their future. Barca did not considerate from a financial point of view. We believed we could do things better for the interests of the club.”
“European football is suffering in order to attract young people and if you add into that, the state-run clubs, there is an evident destabilisation.”
“The previous board tried to compete with the state clubs, something which is impossible to do. These clubs are financially doping with support from outside. That means that clubs like ours have to choose between having stars or suffering economically. And here nobody wants to stop.”
“It is for that reason that we want to support the Superleague. A more equal competition that will help confront these problems. The clubs are going to govern their own destiny. It makes me laugh when state clubs say that the teams of the Superleague say we are the rich.”
“The Superleague will be an open league, based on meritocracy and we will work to improve the state leagues. I am sure that if the [court] resolution is favourable for our interests, we will be able to offer a format to the liking of everyone. Soon there will be news and channels of dialogue will be established.”
The court decision he is referring to relates to a European Court of Arbitration case, between UEFA and the Superleague clubs. It will rule on whether UEFA are monopolising the market and essentially decide the legal basis of whether the Superleague can proceed uninhibited by UEFA themselves.
“While the Superleague cannot be implemented, we are not standing still and we have moved in order to make the most competitive team possible.”
This follows on from a similar pitch made by Florentino Perez to Real Madrid’s members last week, as they seek to gather support for the project.
I cant believe Im saying this but laporta is right for once in his life.
UEFA bending over from state backed clubs while wanting to “preserve football” is biggest contradiction mankind has seen.
Who cares what media thinks about it, theyre paid to think.
But as a football fan, just think about it, PSG is bleeding money in range of hundreds of millions of euro but somehow have assembled an allstar squad with allstar wages to boot.
City has never even won a CL (its around 90 mil euros prize money) but have spent literally billions on players, baldy only spent 1,2 bil during his time.