How Barcelona Lost Its Way

The current incarnation of Barcelona dates to 2003 and the election of the charismatic, ambitious outsider Joan Laporta as president. He had the air, back then, of a Catalan Kennedy: a handsome lawyer, an ardent separatist, ushering in a bright new era. He trailed in his wake a slew of specialists cut from precisely the same cloth: Sandro Rosell and Bartomeu would both go on to be presidents of Barcelona; Ferran Soriano would be given the keys to Manchester City; Marc Ingla now runs the French club Lille.

Laporta stood for what he called a “generational revolution.” Barcelona had been run for too long by the same old faces with the same old voices and the same old ideas. He saw a need to drag the club forward. He encouraged his subordinates to come up with ideas to increase Barcelona’s flagging revenues. He wanted the team to reflect the place: not just by building the team around the talent flowering at La Masia, the club’s academy, but by tapping into the booming entrepreneurial spirit of turn-of-the-century Catalonia.

Barcelona has continued to act in that spirit, even as the faces in charge of the club have changed. Laporta was deposed in 2010, and his successor, his onetime protégé Rosell, resigned in disgrace after he was accused of financial crimes in 2014. But in 2017 the club started an innovation hub, with the stated aim of becoming the Silicon Valley of soccer. And in 2018 it laid claim to being the first sports team to surpass $1 billion in revenue.

Barcelona, slowly, made the leap from sports team to business consultancy case study. In his book “The Barcelona Way,” Damian Hughes, a professor of organizational psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, detailed the five key principles that underpinned Barcelona’s success. By following the club’s methods, he wrote, it is possible to “learn to unlock the DNA of a winning culture.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/25/sports/soccer/barcelona-napoli-champions-league.html