Dimarts, 22 de setembre del 2015

SPEECH BY JOSEP MARIA BARTOMEU

Dear Anita, dear students at the Harvard Business School, thank you very much for focusing your attention on FC , our beloved club, and thanks very much to having me here.

I am talking to you from the venue of our dreams, I am speaking to you from Camp Nou.

Anita Elberse presents today the case of FC Barcelona at Harvard. For us it is a source of great satisfaction that the best business school in the world is looking at our case due to its unique nature and its importance in the world of sport.

The figures speak for themselves.

We are one of the leaders in the football business.

Given that this year we have won the three most important trophies of the season for the second time in our history – the Champions League, the Spanish League and the Spanish Cup – we can say without fear of contradiction that at the moment that FC Barcelona is the number one club in the world.

In August we won the European Super Cup in Tbilisi in Georgia and in December we will play in the FIFA World Club Cup in Yokohama, Japan. We have before us the chance to do something that most of the big clubs from around the world could only dream of. I hope you all wish us good luck, as we are going to need it. It is not easy to win a trophy, I can assure you.

I believe that the football industry is very familiar to you all. It is an industry that is growing and growing and all the big clubs efforts are focused on growing in an ordered, fair and sustainable manner, as transparently as possible for a business that sustains itself on fierce competition and on the fact that the majority of clubs are private entities.

The case of FC Barcelona that Anita Elberse presents will introduce you to a club with some very particular characteristics. The club belongs to 145,000 members who every six years elect a Board of Directors who, under the supervision of the delegates, are in charge of making the club grow on the field and sustaining it as a profitable business.

But today, I don’t want to talk about business, I want to talk to you about the spirit of this global sport that is understood by everyone on this planet. It is a multilingual, multiracial business in which the main focus is something so simple as a spherical plastic object known to us all as ‘the ball.’

The ball is the center of everything. It is the star of the show.

And today I want to refer clearly to this subject. The ball. The success of FC Barcelona is centred on in my opinion the fact that for four decades we have been trying to treat the ball with the respect that this sport deserves. From our youth teams to our great stars, Leo Messi, and Luis Suárez – Andrés Iniesta, Gerard Piqué, the ball is the focus of all our efforts. Our way of playing is a reflection of the five basic tenets on which for the essence of our love for football: Effort, Team work, Respect, Humility and Ambition.

They are five characteristics that, mixed with our philosophy of playing the game, has allowed us to move towards a model of football that makes us unique and has given us more trophies than any other club in the world over the last ten years.

Barcelona’s model proposes that the ball is the essence of the industry, that we have to go back to basics, to the central philosophy of the business in question and once in focus, respect it, love it and develop it. The ball must be at the centre of our decision making.

It is our job and our goal.