Twenty years after Real Madrid’s last vote, Barça enters the pre-election campaign again: each entity has its vices and the electoral processes in the Catalan club are a bit like the humidity of old apartments, which are always there no matter how much you try to hide them. There is no indication yet of an official call on the nearest horizon, nor is there a need. There is no need to raise your hand to make the first stone fly, nor to enroll candidates to create a mess that is mixed as standard. Laporta knows this well and has never completely abandoned him because, why deny it, it is a genre that he dominates.
Messi’s reappearance at Camp Nou could be the signal everyone was waiting for, even if they deny it. Prudence is highly appreciated in a social mass that is always silently plotting revolutions, which is why no one has dared to excessively celebrate this starting signal disguised as nostalgia. The myth lands, smiles, lets himself be photographed in the living room of the common house, and immediately the aspirants go into rune reading mode, like those Vikings who did not dare set foot in the future in England without first consulting the gods. Messi’s every gesture is interpreted with the precision of a horoscope published in an architecture magazine: if he winks with his right eye it is a gesture of forgiveness towards Laporta; if he opens his left too much, a whisper in Font’s ear; If he looks at the ground, like he always did before raising hell, he might just be hungry. At Barça it is enough for Messi to sleep in the same province as the club’s headquarters for everyone to feel that he has something in mind.
The first to pick up Laporta’s invisible glove was Víctor Font, his main rival in the previous elections and custodian of the trust of 16,679 deputies on that occasion. This is no small feat: almost one voter in three appreciated his proposal for modernization compared to the messianism of the current president and the apocryphal continuity of Toni Freixa. His act this week was not really an election proclamation, but rather a more or less elegant way to remind people that he is there for whatever they need, the systems specialist with a new prototype ready for installation. He is not a pastor of souls with too much free time, like Agustí Benedito. Not an aspiring talk show host, like so many other candidates in the club’s more recent history. Font can be seen coming from afar because he has very shiny hair and always waves a scarf.
Almost everything that happens in this club for some time has been happening unofficially, which is a rather ingenious way to capture the attention of the whole world. With Messi more omnipresent than ever, Camp Nou about to open its doors and Josep María Minguella wearing combat glasses, the atmosphere intimately smells of one of those new beginnings that are announced at Barça every three months: if any writer decides to rewrite his story for the umpteenth time, he should consider a format structured as a succession of prologues. Ultimately, Barça will always be that club where no one starts anything and everyone starts everything at the same time, unable to close one chapter before starting the next. It’s normal that almost no one wants to abandon that book.
