Someone recently posted a heartbreaking image on X. And the cosmic bullshit circulating on Elon Musk’s social network can cause a heart attack every two seconds. A woman wearing a kind of gray dungarees walked along the athletics track that surrounds the grass of the Lluís Companys stadium. The club employee gestured with one arm up and down encouraging the stands and with the other held a sign in Blaugrana colors that said in Catalan: “Raise the scarf.” Like those counselors on TV shows who liven up the atmosphere by making it seem like everyone is having fun with the presenter’s jokes. What will happen next, give a sandwich and pay for the bus?
Each club is embarking on its own futuristic headquarters project. The NFL, the Aitana concerts, the best stadium of the World Cup in Spain, the Ibai Llanos evening. If I were president I would be more concerned with involving the stands with the team than with making the space profitable 90% of the time with matters other than football. Barça’s return to Camp Nou next Saturday is great news, but the two-and-a-half-year journey hides far more worrying issues than the pigeon droppings that found their way into the plates where the legendary sausage sandwiches were prepared in the old stadium. And, of course, the need to generate even more revenue.
The move to Montjuic, far from being able to be used as a factual argument for staying at home (the cold, the escalators that don’t work, the sursum corda…), demolished that old excuse of certain culés for not going to the stadium. It’s very expensive, there are no season tickets, there are no tickets. Anyone could have been a member during these two years or participated in specific games. Is there anything more exciting than seeing your team live? Especially if you live in the city where your team plays, the tickets are affordable, you can walk or take public transport with your family or friends and the matches are the size of those played by Barça. What could be the obstacle? A detachment from face to face? A rejection of Montjuic, the city’s watchtower and heart of the glorious moment of the ’92 Olympic Games?
Barça has 140,000 members, of which 80,000 have seats. The move to Montjuic would have left half of them without season tickets. A problem. But even so, only just over 21,000 remained and the stadium was almost never full. We have gone from having funds infected by mafias and criminals to transforming them into soulless “animation spaces”. No fans. Sometimes, without people. The really important thing are the VIP boxes.
Last year, in a great season, on the verge of reaching the Champions League final, with Lamine Yamal in full swing and making us forget for the first time the nightmare of Messi’s departure, very few took advantage of the historic opportunity offered by the calamities of the Limak construction company. Perhaps you will remember the brand new return on Saturday at the Camp Nou against Athetic de Bilbao, when the cheapest ticket cost 199 euros and 589, the most expensive one.
