Laporta set to skip Barcelona’s Qatar shirt vote - 7M sport

Laporta set to skip Barcelona’s Qatar shirt vote



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Posted Saturday, September 24, 2011 by YAHOO Sport

MADRID (AP)—Former Barcelona President Joan Laporta is unlikely to attend Saturday’s club assembly vote over a lucrative shirt deal that he says makes the Spanish champions look more like Qatar’s national team.

Barcelona’s members can reject a ?170 million ($230 million), five-year sponsorship deal with the Qatar Foundation, which has put paid advertising on the club’s navy and crimson colored shirts for the first time in its 112-year history. Former coach and player Johan Cruyff has labeled the deal “vulgar.”

Current President Sandro Rosell insists the European champion needs the money to stay at its current level, with the club having won 12 trophies in the past three-plus seasons.

“Our team looks like the Qatar national team now. It’s a lie that a deal had to be struck with Qatar because we lack money,” Laporta told The Associated Press. “They say Barcelona is in bad shape economically (but) all external signs point to the club being in the best shape it’s ever been for results and economically speaking. They need to explain the Qatar contract in full (because) they’ve sold the shirt for four cents.”

Laporta said he was unlikely to attend because he did not want the meeting to descend into a circus with him as the sideshow distracting from the vote at hand.

Laporta and Rosell have become bitter foes with Rosell accusing Laporta of abusing the club’s finances and leaving it with unreported debts, while Laporta claims his former assistant is happy to slander his name and his former board to gain credit for the success achieved by a team that was put together under his mandate, which lasted from 2003 to 2010.

“I hope Barcelona’s members think about the club and know that to sign the players and launch programs we want to we need these funds,” Rosell said. “If we don’t have this money I don’t know what we’ll do. We’d find a way but it would still be a blow.”

Barcelona’s revenues jumped from ?123 million ($166 million) at the start of Laporta’s reign to the record ?480 million ($650 million) announced for the 2010-11 season, making the Catalan club the second richest earner after top rival Real Madrid.

“How can you buy Cesc (Fabregas) and Alexis (Sanchez) if you are broke?” said Laporta, who released an open letter Thursday criticizing Rosell’s “lies” against his former board. “Things are going well because we did good work for seven years.”

Unlike other top football clubs, Barcelona had previously refused to sell advertising space to a shirt sponsor even paying UNICEF ?1.5 million ($2 million) to use its logo in a deal struck by Laporta in 2006. The UNICEF logo, which was the first to ever be displayed on the club’s jersey, now rests on the back below the player’s number.

Thousands of fans have signed a petition to have the Qatar Foundation logo removed, with the nonprofit foundation’s yellow branding already appearing on all sports wear, advertising and even on the tunnel leading onto the field.

“By selling the shirt, it shows me that we are not being creative,” Cruyff commented, “and that we have become vulgar.”

But while Cruyff and Laporta have hit out over the deal, Guardiola backed it earlier this week.

“The club would have preferred to have left the jersey empty but times aren’t what they once were,” said Guardiola, who was an ambassador to Qatar’s 2022 World Cup bid. “I lived there and they treated me phenomenally. Qatar is the most open and accessible country in the Middle East—if it wasn’t they wouldn’t have been awarded the World Cup.”

More than 173,000 members are eligible to vote.

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