Improvisation is an art. And you have to recognize Joan Laporta’s immense ability to act without a script. The president of Barça also excels with skill in the art of make-up, an essential quality to be a soldier in the Marketing Champions. For good things and for bad things, at the head of Barça, there is someone who can place a health policy on a dead man. In the Far West, Laporta would arrive in the villages with a wagon full of bottles of hair lotion and other masterful formulas. In a minute, I’d sell the whole load without getting off the tartan.
Barcelona fans are supposed to be satisfied today. Barça will be able to register players in the league thanks to what the Barça president has done. We already saw the trick, known as leverage, last year. It consists of selling the club’s assets to people who aspire to earn, with what they have bought, much more money than they paid for.
But rather than levers, we should talk about life preservers, which is what you hold on to when you’re drowning. It is necessary to acknowledge the merit of the Barcelona board for having placed the word “lever” in the market of words. If the life preserver sends a last resort that is only intended to prevent you from dying, the Laportian lever seems like something that should be celebrated in a big way. But, in reality, the two terms would represent the same thing: an intubation to supply air to the lungs to prevent the patient from asphyxiating. And here the patient is Barça.
Impossible to assess to what extent the last lever is favorable or harmful for the club. Not without first knowing all the details we don’t know about it yet. Since the contracts have small print, you will have to pay attention to the explanations that, in favor of transparency, Barça ends up providing in order to make a reasoned judgment about the operation. For the time being, we remain in the realm of wishful thinking: hopefully the club has made a good deal, despite the fact that there is no truer law than the one that says that, in any negotiation, the person who loses the most is the person who is in a hurry to finish- the. And, in this case, the Blaugrana club was in a hurry, because the window of the league where the players were registered was already closing.
But it is urgent that Barcelona fans pay more attention to the evolution of the club than it has ever been. The music that is playing – stock market, funds, etc. – is that of an entity that has started a privatization process. What belonged to the partners becomes the property of other gentlemen. It’s not good news. It is a different matter that it is inevitable.
