Barcelona fans and athletes gathered in front of Camp Nou stadium on Thursday, but for the first time in recent memory, they were not all smiles and good cheer.
Instead, they came to protest the club’s decision to slash funding for its 12 minority sport teams and to eliminate its 80-year-old baseball team altogether.
About 100 adult and children players from a variety of Barcelona’s amateur sports teams held a long banner that read: “SOS Amateur Sports Teams.”
“It just seems ludicrous,” said Peter Hall, the rugby team’s sole Englishman. “They are saying it is because of money, but as far as I am aware, the football club has just won the most prestigious tournament in the world.”
Barcelona has long prided itself on being “more than a club” by supporting sports other than soccer.
However, the most heralded club in world soccer is also deeply in debt. It owes 364 million euros (US$531.69 million) and lost 21 million euros last season, despite winning the Champions League and Spanish league titles and having implemented cost-control measures. And like many other European soccer clubs, the Catalan giants know they must balance the books as soon as FIFA moves to strengthen its financial “fair play” rules and penalize clubs that are chronic overspenders.
“Barca can’t continue to lose money,” Javier Faus, Barcelona’s vice president of finances, said on Wednesday.
Barcelona president Sandro Rosell set fiscal responsibility as a goal when he took power before the 2010-2011 season, and he now plans to reduce funding for minority sports from 10 to 5 percent of the budget over the next five years.
According to the club, Barcelona’s minority sports ran a deficit of 43.5 million euros last season. The largest losses came from the four highly successful professional basketball, handball, indoor soccer and roller hockey teams. The club’s eight amateur sports teams — field hockey, volleyball, rugby, wheelchair basketball, athletics, skating, ice hockey and baseball — accounted for 2.8 million euros of the total annual deficit.
“If [soccer player Javier] Mascherano takes a pay cut to come to play at Barca and if we almost recently lost Dani Alves, why shouldn’t we ask the minority sports teams to make a sacrifice?” Faus asked. “It isn’t fair that they don’t make the same efforts as other areas of the club.”
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