La Sagrada Familia, arguably Barcelona’s most iconic landmark, is famously not quite finished. The first stones of the gothic cathedral were laid in 1882, but it’s not expected to be fully complete until 2034 at the earliest. That’ll be 152 years. Quite a while.
Fans of Barcelona football club are also starting to grumble, as it turns out that another iconic temple in the city might be operating on the same kind of biblical timescale; their Camp Nou (New Field) stadium.
FC Barcelona last played at the Camp Nou in May 2023 and since then it has been closed for reconstruction. The new Camp Nou was scheduled to reopen late last year – and then in mid-February. It has now been delayed until at least late April. The kick-off for next season seems more likely and, even then, it won’t be fully complete until at least the 2026-27 season.
I often have a beer or two in a bar up my street that’s festooned with Barça flags and shirts signed by local players. It’s packed, especially on match days, with Cules, as Barça fans are called (from cul, the Catalan word for “bum”, because in the olden days their bums could be seen hanging over the original stadium walls).
“Why’s it taking so bloody long to rebuild the damn thing?” said Fimon. “How hard can it be? It’s a bit of grass with some seats around it!”
“I thought it was supposed to be open by now,” added Pere. “They say it’ll be open soon-ish but so what? We’ll still have to watch games on the telly because it’ll only be half built.”
At Barça the attention is all the more forensic because the 140,000 or so socios (members) actually own the club and elect its president. The club has long been in a financial mess and, to some fans, spending €1.5bn on the stadium is simply bonkers. They hope that the €300m deal with Spotify and funding from banks led by Goldman Sachs will help.
Not so long ago, though, Barça (motto: mes que un club “more than a club”) didn’t even sell the space across their players’ chests. Their shirts had Unicef on them from 2006 until 2011, in solidarity with the cause of suffering children across the world.
“It’s all corporate crap,” pitched in Luis. “Barça has been so badly run for so long, we’re now in the pockets of the banks.”
My God though, they’re a whiney bunch, these Barça fans. They remind me of Manchester United supporters. In my view Barça fans, like their Man Utd counterparts, have been spoiled by success. They’re only happy if they win the treble. As a silverware-starved Newcastle United fan (last trophy: 1969), I’d hold an open-top bus parade if The Toon won a Tiddlywinks trophy. Even a plastic one.
I’ve covered FC Barcelona, on and off, for over a decade. The peak was the magical MSN trident of Leo Messi, Luis Suárez and Neymar. They won the treble in 2015, adding La Liga, domestic cup and Champions League trophies to the already jam-packed trophy cabinet in the Barça museum.
The stadium has long let the side down. The old Camp Nou was actually a bit of a dump. A revamp of the tired 1950s concrete slab was long overdue.
A case in point was the awful press room, a tiny little bunker that would never pass a health and safety inspection in the UK, especially during a Champion’s League game when the world’s press all try to squeeze in.
For now, home games have been played up the hill at the equally battered old stadium that hosted the 1992 Olympics. It’s an interesting tourist attraction and concert venue but it’s a drafty, soulless football stadium. Its capacity is “only” around 55,000, tiny by Barça standards; the old Camp Nou could fit around 99,000.
The revamped stadium is expected to host 104,000. And where do the locked out 50,000 watch the matches in the meantime?
In the bar up my street.
Adrian Addison is a journalist living in Barcelona
