Who owns barcelona fc

We bet that at least one of these facts will come as a surprise. Read on to brush up on your knowledge of one of the most celebrated football clubs of all time. Many football fans are unaware that there is in fact another football team based in Barcelona which enjoys strong support in the city. The RCD Espanyol was formed back in and was the first football team in Spain to be formed entirely of Spanish players.

Perhaps one of the most famous Barca players — and managers — of all times is the Dutch born Johann Cruyff. He joined Barcelona in after a stint at Ajax and played with the club for a few years before moving to America. The FC Barcelona is one of the few clubs in the world to be owned by the club members themselves. Together these members form the governing body of the club and in there were an estimated , socis or members in Catalan.

Not a bad club to be part of when you consider that Barca was recently ranked second most valuable club in the world by Forbes magazine. From its inception the club has had strong ties with the Catalan nationalist movement, with both supporters and management seeing the club as a symbol of local identity. At the outbreak of the civil war, the club president Josep Sunyol — a staunch supporter of independence — was assassinated by Falangist troupes.

The club motto Mes Que Un Club More Than a Club is central to the idea of being members-led, applying a democratic approach to an institution that is synonymous with Catalan pride. We will often hear from the Barcelona president, but that individual is not the owner of the club; merely a part-owner, elected by other owners. The Barcelona presidential elections are held every six years, but may take place earlier in exceptional circumstances. Barcelona members are known as socis in Catalan or socios in Spanish.

The words socis and socios translate to 'partners' in English. Following their move to the newly built Camp Nou, the club's officials decided to turn a new leaf and appoint Helenio Herrera as the new manager. Even though Barcelona made the history books by becoming the first team to defeat Real Madrid in the European Cup , the 60s as a whole were largely a disappointing time for the club's supporters.

With Di Stefano in his prime, Real Madrid was simply too strong of an opponent and Barcelona had to settle with two Copa del Rey trophies for the decade. Ironically, this would prove to be a common theme in the coming years. In the Dutch star Johan Cruyff joined the club and was one of the reasons that the team managed to claim a La Liga title in , the first in ten years. The waiting for the next league victory would again hang over ten years until the team with Terry Venables as manager could win another one.

In , Cruyff came up with the idea of founding a football academy that would function on the same principles as the celebrated Ajax Youth Academy. His proposal was eventually accepted, and an old country building named La Masia was converted into the Academy headquarters.

In the years that followed, La Masia became the most revered football academy in the entire world, known as much for its immaculate top-down organization as for the many players who passed through it and became stars.

The year of is notable for Cruyff's return to Barcelona, this time in a position of manager. Perhaps even more importantly, the football philosophy Cruyff brought with himself to the club served as a stepping stone to what would later become the tiki-taka system.

Barcelona's model of ownership has been largely successful for most of its history but has been prone to mismanagement by the board of directors on several occasions in the past. Ownership of big football clubs is often controversial in the UK - but abroad, Barcelona, realmadrid and Bayern Munich are coops , owned by fans.

Barcelona's registered members are in charge of electing the board of directors and the president of the club. Each president has a mandated term of six years at the club. Barcelona was established by Joan Gamper in and has been a registered association throughout its history. The club has always been an emblem of Catalunya and continues to be a torchbearer for the people of Barcelona.

Josep Maria Bartomeu is the current president of Barcelona. The Catalan executive is not particularly a fan favourite of the club and has been accused of mismanaging the club. Barcelona has struggled to live up to the expectations of the fans in the recent past and it is becoming increasingly evident that the team's shortcomings on the pitch are a direct result of the board's incompetence behind the scenes.