Barcelona will "never, ever be for sale"

Posted Tuesday, November 08, 2011 by ESPN

Barcelona president Sandro Rosell has hit out at the growing trend of foreign ownership of football clubs and insisted his own club will "never, ever be for sale".

Rosell, the elected head of the Catalan club which has 180,000 members, wants to see more clubs adopt the model of member ownership that Barcelona employ, but instead fears more of the middle eastern and American money that has infiltrated the English Premier League will instead head to Spain in search of new opportunities.

"It is a pity," he told the International Football Arena conference in Zurich.

"I don't like it but it's happening. It's the open market. In the Premier League there are no more clubs to be sold so now they are coming to Spain. It has gone so far now, I do not think anything can be done about it.

"Barcelona is not a business, it is a feeling. We are not owned by anybody, we are an association; we do not have 'clients'. I will never put a game on at 12 noon for the Chinese audience. We do want to open up our market but not to forget our roots. While I am the president, Barcelona will never, ever be for sale."

But Rosell was forced to defend Barca's recent decision to sell shirt sponsorship for the first time, having received 166million euros from Qatar in a five-year deal, saying that it was the only way Barca could compete with owner-funded clubs.

"The fact that it comes from a country is no different to a commercial sponsorship," he said.

"If we did not have to fight against competition which has capital, I would never sell anything on the shirt. It would be virgin."

But while he was critical of the ownership model that pervades in the Premier League, he admitted that the television rights deal that splits money equally between all 20 clubs would soon need to be adopted in Spain, where at present Barca and Real Madrid keep around 66% of the funds.

"The television rights are negotiated individually now, but in three, four, five years' time, we will have to put them all in one pot and make La Liga as it is in Italy and the Premier League," Rosell said.

"We and Real Madrid are talking to the rest of the clubs. We understand this is the future and it has to happen. But I believe we must reduce the number of clubs in La Liga, from 20 clubs to 16."