FC Barcelona

Spectators at the Clàssic of 25 October 2026, lost 1-2 to Real Madrid.

62,055

Takings from this single match, a club record.

€19.1 m

Ligas won, the latest in 2025-26.

29

Women’s Champions League won on 23 May 2026 in Oslo (4-0 against Lyon), the fourth.

4th

Sources : Ara, 30/10/2026 · Crónica Global, 29/10/2026 · 3Cat, 19/09/2026 · Infobae, 13/04/2026

The keys

• The club belongs to its members. Barça has no shareholders: its socis elect the president, one person, one vote. On 15 March 2026, Joan Laporta was re-elected with 68% of votes cast, on a 42% turnout. With Real Madrid, Athletic Bilbao and Osasuna, it is one of the few Spanish professional clubs still run as associations.
• “Més que un club”. The phrase, “more than a club”, dates from 17 January 1968. The future president Narcís de Carreras uses it under Franco, when Catalan institutions are banned. The stadium becomes a place where a repressed identity can show itself en masse.
• A style as much as a record. Since Johan Cruyff, a player in 1973 and then coach in 1988, the club has defended an idea of the game. Keep the ball, attack, develop players. Its academy, La Masia, produced Xavi, Iniesta, Messi and much of Spain’s 2010 World Cup-winning side.
• An economic power in debt. Barça is the world’s second-richest club by revenue, and one of the most indebted. It has sold part of its future income to stay afloat, and is financing a stadium costing €1.8 billion.
• Two rivals, two meanings. Real Madrid is the sporting and symbolic opponent: Barcelona against the capital. Espanyol, the city’s other club, based in Cornellà, is the derbi rival. It is often described, rightly or wrongly, as the club of Barcelona residents attached to Spain.

A hundred and twenty-seven years in twenty dates

For those who do not follow football, Barça’s history reads like that of 20th-century Catalonia. Dictatorships, war, the return of democracy, a globalised city. Sporting dates are kept only when they changed the club or the city.

Landmarks · the timeline to scale

1. 1899
   Foundation. The Swiss Hans Gamper, who would call himself Joan, places an advertisement in Los Deportes on 22 October. The club is born on 29 November at the Gimnàs Solé, with eleven present: Swiss, English, Germans and Catalans.
2. 1922
   Les Corts. The club moves into a stadium of over 20,000 seats at Les Corts, then on the edge of the city. Football becomes a mass spectacle.
3. 1925
   The jeered anthem. On 14 June, at Les Corts, the crowd jeers the Royal March during Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship. The governor suspends the club for six months; Gamper is ousted and exiled to Switzerland. He dies in 1930.
4. 1936
   A president shot. On 6 August, Josep Sunyol, club president and a deputy for the Catalan Republican Left, is murdered. Francoist soldiers kill him in the Sierra de Guadarrama.
5. 1943
   The 11-1. Cup semi-final in Madrid: Real win 11-1. The climate of intimidation is documented; its extent is still debated by historians.
6. 1950
   Kubala. The Hungarian László Kubala arrives in June. His play fills Les Corts and makes a larger stadium necessary.
7. 1957
   The Camp Nou. Opening of the “new ground”, which will become the largest stadium in Europe. Les Corts is demolished in 1966.
8. 1968
   “Més que un club”. Narcís de Carreras coins the motto on 17 January. The club had already come close to it in its bulletin of April 1933.
9. 1973
   Cruyff as a player. Signed from Ajax for a record fee, the Dutchman wins the Liga in his first season. The 0-5 at Real Madrid’s stadium marks a whole generation.
10. 1974
    An anthem in Catalan. For its 75th anniversary, the club adopts “El cant del Barça”, sung in Catalan and still taken up at every match.
11. 1979
    La Masia. The old farmhouse near the stadium becomes a boarding house for young players from far away. The name has since stood for the club’s whole academy.
12. 1992
    Wembley. On 20 May, Koeman’s free kick against Sampdoria brings a first European Cup, with Cruyff on the bench. Two months later, Barcelona hosts the Olympic Games.
13. 2006
    Paris and Unicef. A second Champions League, against Arsenal. The same year, the club puts a name on its shirt for the first time, Unicef’s, and pays to display it.
14. 2009
    Six titles out of six. Under Pep Guardiola, a La Masia graduate, Barça win every competition they enter in a single year. Messi, who arrived from Rosario aged thirteen, is its leading figure.
15. 2015
    The last men’s treble. Liga, Copa del Rey and Champions League, won on 6 June in Berlin against Juventus.
16. 2017
    Closed doors on 1 October. On the day of the self-determination referendum, during the police charges, the club refuses to postpone its match. It plays Las Palmas in an empty Camp Nou.
17. 2021
    Messi leaves, the women win. On 5 August, the club announces that it cannot afford to keep Messi. Three months earlier, the women’s team had won its first Champions League.
18. 2022
    The “palanques”. To cover its losses, the club sells 25% of its Liga TV rights for 25 years to the American fund Sixth Street. It also sells the stadium’s naming rights to Spotify, effective 1 July.
19. 2023-2025
    Exile to Montjuïc. During the partial demolition and rebuilding of the Camp Nou, Barça play at the Estadi Olímpic, built for the 1929 Exhibition. They then gradually return to their stadium under construction.
20. 2026
    A bumper year, strained accounts. Laporta re-elected in March, a 29th Liga and the Super Cup in May, a fourth women’s Champions League on 23 May. The 2025-26 accounts show record revenue and a loss of €18 m.

Barça in popular culture

Barça is one of the few institutions shared by a worker from L’Hospitalet and a notary from Sarrià. A supporter in Lagos who has never seen the Mediterranean shares it too. The writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán described it as Catalonia’s symbolic, unarmed army: a way of being a nation without a state, on Sundays.

Under Franco, Catalan is banned from public life but not from the stands. Historians qualify this account: the post-war presidents were approved by the regime, and the club also honoured the dictator. The myth of resistance arose after the fact; it has nonetheless become a lived reality.

What Barça weighs

Barça is a medium-sized business living on a rare asset: the attention of hundreds of millions of people. Its revenue comes from the stadium, TV rights, sponsors and merchandise. The problem is not making money, but spending less than it makes.

These figures should be compared with care. The club’s “ordinary” revenue excludes transfer gains; Deloitte’s follows another definition and another season. Total debt includes the stadium financing, to be repaid over several decades from its own income.

Myth or reality

• Barça belongs to its supporters. Vrai To its socis, to be precise: 151,787 at 30 June 2026, who pay an annual fee. Only 114,504 could vote in March 2026 (adults with one year’s membership). Most supporters around the world are not socis.
• The Camp Nou is currently the largest stadium in Europe. Faux It was before the works and will be again with 104,600 seats. In November 2026, it offers around 62,000, fewer than the Bernabéu or Wembley.
• The club was always a bastion of resistance to Francoism. Faux The post-war directors were approved by the regime. The club was a refuge for Catalan identity, especially from the 1960s, which is not the same as organised resistance.
• The shirt carried no sponsor for more than a century. Vrai Until 2006. The first name displayed was Unicef’s, to which the club paid money; commercial sponsors came later.
• According to tradition, the word “culé” comes from the spectators’ backsides. Vrai This is the explanation given by tradition and taken up by the club, with the wall on Carrer Indústria. There is no written evidence from the period.

Where to see it