🗣️ President Laporta: "The Negreira case is a campaign against Barça. We have to be self-critical, but it was something we inherited. Having refereeing advice is not a crime. Barça has never bought a referee, apart from the fact that perhaps we did not sufficiently value what it meant that the son of a former referee gave us advice. This has gone out of control, because there is an orchestrated campaign to transform Barça into a SAD (Sociedad anónima deportiva / Public limited sports company)." via @sport
Laporta: "The Negreira case, I link it to the fact that we have not signed with CVC, fortunately, because it mortgaged Barça for 50 years while keeping 10.95% of the clubs' television rights. It was still a loan and we did not see the operation to be of any interest to us."
Laporta: "As we needed to save the club, we sold 25% of our television rights for €686M and that saved the club. It hasn't finished fixing it, because we still have an operating deficit of €200M that we are tackling with an austerity plan, but what we didn't see, was the contract with CVC."
Laporta: "CVC deal? One of the conditions was that Tebas would stay, first for 15 years and then for 8. His salary is double than that of bank presidents. We were told that if we did this operation he would give us fair play, 15%. He told us that if we didn't sign the deal, we wouldn't be able to sign players and that they would make it more difficult for us."
Laporta: "You come to the conclusion that Catalonia may be within the state, but even so, some cannot digest the elements that define our Catalan identity. They cannot digest that one of the elements of the Catalan identity is Barça."
Laporta: "So, the gentlemen of La Liga, those of CVC and other established powers, they should know that they will have us defending the interests of Barça until the last drop of our blood. We do this because we love Barça."
Laporta: "It's good that Barça is not a SAD (Public limited sports company), as that makes us belong to the community. Barça belongs to the city, to the country, obviously to its members and that allows us to do many things that other clubs cannot do."
Laporta: "Barça is Cruyff-Masia-Catalunya-Unicef. You can understand Cruyff as a genuine way of playing football. You can understand La Masia as the dream factory of those kids who want to make it to the first team. As for Catalonia, you can't separate Catalan identity from democracy and Barcelonaism is inseperable from those two concepts. Unicef illustrates that Barça has a social commitment to values. This is more typical of an association such as Barça than a commercial company."
Laporta: "Football has a very powerful emotional factor. It is different from any business. For the rest it is not so different. You also invest, in this case in players, in facilities and picking up the virtuous circle, investing in players makes members and fans become attached to the entity and the club, they then spend on their club and the economy comes out reinforced to invest in football again."
Laporta: "Once the Qataris signed Neymar for €222M, It made people here at the club react badly to managing that money."
Laporta: "The women's team was good and we took advantage of it to win the Champions League. It is a merit of the previous board and ours, for making two historical attendance records. It was spectacular and it makes me proud to be the president of Barça. We have a team that wins and we all like to win, but they also do it by playing well."
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