Why Barça is more than a club?

Small stories, big stories

President Narcís de Carreras (1905 – 1991) was who proclaimed the slogan «Barça, més que un club» in his presidential acceptance speech in January of 1968 that is still today the motto of the club.

Some reasons:

1) Barça lived for many decades of the 20th century under dictatorships that persecuted Catalan language and culture (Primo de Rivera closed down it for six months and Franco sought to destroy the club’s social significance). Under these circumstances, Barça always supported Catalan sentiments and the defence of its own language and culture.

2) What is more, its special Catalan nationalist character provides fans to «Español», the second football club of Barcelona, which tries to shake off the Spanish nationalist «brand».

3) President’s club Josep Sunyol (1898-1936) led this process of implication with Catalonia’s own culture and institutions, using the slogan “sport and citizen ship”, the purpose being to imply sports in the country’s social and cultural affairs. Sunyol, who was also a member of parliament, was shot dead early in the Spanish Civil War in 1936; and from then on, the club came to be an icon of the defence of the Republic, as shown by the tour of Mexico and the United States in 1937.

4) Outside of Catalonia, in many parts of Spain, Barça also became symbolic of democracy and anti-centralism.

5) When democracy returned after the death of Franco, the club maintained its social commitment and new ways of supporting charitable causes emerged, which would later be encompassed by the creation of the club’s Foundation.

6) Now in times of globalisation, Barça has extended its social commitment to the rest of the planet, with a specially significant event being the signing of an agreement with Unicef in 2006, which was a way of saying that a sports club should not be marginal to problems going on in society, in this case, the plight of children around the world.

Sure you can find more reasons. Try it!

I hope I have pleased you,

Monsieur de Voltaire

Concert from freedom. Nou Camp 2013, 29th June