2023-05-29 13:56:49
Joan Laporta celebrated the laying of the foundation stone of the new Camp Nou like someone celebrating a goal. He knows he has won the game. The partner has bought the reform project from him without protest. It doesn’t matter to him if it costs more money, if the financing can reach an interest rate of 7%, if the construction company comes from Turkey and is not listed on the stock market, or if the works finish later than planned and the exile in Montjuïc has to be extended . The excitement of having a new stadium has overtaken everything, even the fact that the price of season tickets is multiplied to help pay back the loan.
There is not much debate about the need to reshape the field and adapt it to the 21st century. Anyone who sets foot on it immediately realizes that its useful life has run out and that the sheet metal and paint that Sandro Rosell had come to announce in the campaign in 2010 is not enough. The aim is that the stadium goes beyond a place where matches are played. That it is active all year. Let it be a money making factory. The question is who does it and, above all, how they do it.
That’s why it’s so important to master the story. Leaving behind the Barça 2000 projects (by Núñez) and Norman Foster’s model (from Laporta’s first presidency), the current board had collected from Bartomeu a project that was ready to go, which only had to be polished and executed. But Laporta wanted nothing from the past. I wanted to be master of the future. He wanted his Camp Nou, even if it ended up costing almost twice as much.
Pascual i Ausió’s initial project aimed to fix the nyap of the first bleachers, which is by far the one with the worst visibility in the stadium. Those who go there every day know it well. It increased the slope and eliminated the last rows. He had a pledge, of course, that about 12,000 seats were lost, which were recovered on top of everything. The latter was the argument of the board, that of working for the good of the partner. And the partner accepted it willingly, even if the football is seen better from the front row of the third tier than from the back of the first tier.
It is clear that the project inherited by Bartomeu also had dark points, such as the price, which the former president already knew would be much more expensive than the 815 million he announced shortly before closing. About 1,200, say the former employees of Espai Barça. But this money also included the new Palau Blaugrana. Today the signed financing is 1,450 million and nowhere is there any item planned for the new pavilion.
There is no doubt that the new Camp Nou will be an extraordinary, majestic stadium. A touristic and architectural claim of which the whole of Barcelona will be proud. But the debt that Barça will have to assume will be very high. And in the same way that Barcelonianism puts on its bib, it also crosses its fingers that we don’t go too far and the remodeling ends up having catastrophic economic consequences. Surely a member-owned Barça will be able to pay for it?
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