2023-10-01 08:28:06
BarcelonaEvery morning that his busy schedule allows Joan Laporta to be in Barcelona, he has breakfast at Europa Cafè accompanied by his praetorian guard. In the winter they tend to sit on the big brown leather sofa inside, under the watchful eye of a chef’s painting, but during the summer and now that autumn has arrived, they want to eternalize the good weather, they sit on the most visible wooden table on the terrace that is in the chamfer between Avinguda Diagonal and Carrer Villarroel. “The Europa Cafè breakfasts have become power meetings and a place to give the president the ball”, a source close to Laporta who knows firsthand the dynamics of these breakfasts told ARA.
“Several people who have gone to these meetings over the past few years have ended up joining Barça in the current term. There are those who always agree with Laporta,” explains the same person. “The most obvious case is that of Enric Masip (Barça handball legend who entered the presidential cabinet in 2021),” he specifies. The same people are not always there, but some of the most common in recent years have been Masip himself, Xavier Arbós (Laporta’s partner in the law firm), Xavier Laporta (his brother), Rafa Yuste (the sports vice president Blaugrana), Jesús Angoy (Barça exporter, son-in-law of Johan Cruyff and a regular at the Camp Nou box office and the Lluís Companys Stadium), José V. Madolell (friend of Laporta who has a daughter on the club’s social committee, Maila Madolell) and Gabriel Cid (member of the Barça social commission). The latter two are particularly active on social networks.
They also appear, sometimes, prominent figures of Catalan power such as Lluís Prenafeta, businessman and politician who was Jordi Pujol’s right-hand man during his beginnings as president of the Generalitat de Catalunya. L’Europa Cafè – or Cafè Europa, as some call it colloquially – has a bagel shop and at breakfast time is a place that attracts office workers around Plaça Francesc Macià. Precisely, the main reason that makes Laporta choose this place is because it is very close to the headquarters of the Laporta & Arbós law firm, located at Avinguda Diagonal 469. “At these breakfasts, we basically talk about life, few important decisions for Barça have been taken there”, points out a person who participated in it in the past.
Previously, Laporta and his trusted men went to have breakfast at Daps, an outstanding establishment in the Barcelona universe at the beginning of the 21st century that was located in the same premises as Europa Cafè and that closed in 2017. And is that these morning meetings were held before Laporta was president of Barça for the first time in 2003 and they continued to be held during the 11 years, from 2010 to 2021, that the leader was not in the Barca box office once he finished his first term Before Daps, the chosen place was the Piper’s Tavern, on the chamfer between Buenos Aires and Villarroel, a regular place for journalists like Joaquim Maria Puyal who has recently closed the shutters.
The meeting places of the other presidents
Europa Cafè, Daps and Piper’s have so far been Laporta’s meeting places as Barça president. But the other Blaugrana representatives have also had their usual meeting spaces. Sandro Rosell invited journalists to his house on Carrer Déu i Mata in Barcelona and the dinners lasted until late at night. “He even had his own waiter,” reports journalist Frederic Porta. “That space was known as the wineryin reference to the winery of Felipe González, where he met with journalists when he lived in Moncloa,” he adds.
Joan Gaspart, for his part, used the Hotel Avenida Palace in Gran Via, until recently his property, as if it were an annex to Barça’s offices. In fact, during the last few years, he has still summoned journalists there who wanted to interview him for matters related to the Barcelona club. “Alfredo Di Stéfano spent his first weeks in Barcelona in this hotel. So this place is the genesis of the Di Stéfano case,” recalls Porta. Among other illustrious guests, the Beatles slept at Hotel Avenida Palace on their only visit to Barcelona.
Josep Lluís Núñez also used a space he owned to organize meetings related to Barça. In his case, it was the top floor of the offices of Núñez and Navarro on Carrer Urgell. “Progressively, since Barça moved to Les Corts, it has become detached from the center of Barcelona and from those places that were so important to the history of Barça in its beginnings, such as Canaletes, Torino or the “Gold of the Rhine,” Porta recalls.
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