FC Barcelona First Vice President Jordi Cardoner Photo: Courtesy of FC Barcelona

 Editor's Note:

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced world football to a halt while clubs make their own efforts in fighting the coronavirus, including La Liga giants FC Barcelona. Jordi Cardoner, FC Barcelona First Vice President and Vice President of the Barca Foundation, shared his views in an interview with Global Times reporter Fan Lingzhi (GT) on a range of topics, including the club's decision to sell the renowned stadium Camp Nou's title rights.



GT: What has the club been doing to fight the pandemic? How many people in the club have tested positive so far? Does the club have enough suppliers and medical supplies to deal with the virus?

Cardoner: The club took action before the administration and health authorities, with the aim of protecting the health of its athletes and workers. 

Sports activities of the professional and amateur teams were suspended, the facilities, both for internal use and those that are open to the public, were closed, and events and tournaments organized by the club itself were canceled, such as the Barca Academy World Cup, which brings together all the Academies that the club has around the world every year.

Regarding the people at the club who have tested positive, unfortunately there have been cases of infections, but due to privacy concerns we shall not disclose any information about this.

Once the State of Alarm was declared, the club launched a #StayAtHome awareness campaign to keep everyone at home and respect the lockdown for the sake of individual and collective health. 

At the same time, we set everything at the club in motion to help support the fight against this crisis. We made the stadium and our facilities available to the health authorities.

The Camp Nou was used as one of the sample collection points for a study to prevent new infections of COVID-­­­19 led by the same Catalan doctors who ran the #YoMeCorono campaign, focusing on the search for a vaccine. 

However, the Barca Foundation has been working with different companies, institutions and organizations to obtain medical supplies, and we also launched adapted programs aimed at children, such as one on the prevention of cyberbullying during quarantine.

GT: How does the club keep regular contact with the first-team players who are at home? How do you manage their home workouts to make sure that they stay in top physical condition? Are there online courses for coaches and players? 

Cardoner:  Throughout all this time, all the players in the team have been training at home and are regularly receiving instructions from the coaches, who are monitoring the work done with the support, from a distance, from the fitness staff. They also assess the videos and photos that the players are sending.

But as well as training, the players have been involved in fighting the effects of the pandemic, joining the #StayAtHome awareness campaign on the internet to keep people at home and helping with some of our charity work. 

But they have also shown their firm commitment to the club. The members of all of our professional sports agreed to a reduction in their salaries in an attempt to minimize the economic effects of this crisis. 

The members of the football first team have donated an additional 2 percent of their income to supplement the salaries of all the club's employees during the ERTE (temporary redundancy) period, which means all employees will still get 100 percent of their salary.

GT: How can the club maintain its fiscal balance throughout this pandemic? It has been said that if the situation does not improve, the players will have to take another salary cut and the club's budget for next season will be reduced by 200 million euros. Is that correct? How have the players reacted to the salary cut? Did it take a lot of effort to persuade them?

Cardoner: The club has already taken a number of steps to try to minimize the impact of the crisis. 

The most important was to promote the ERTE, which I already mentioned earlier, as well as the reduction of the salaries of the first team players and all the professional athletes at the club, who from the very start showed total willingness to help, as they are aware of the seriousness of the situation and knew they had to do something to help minimize the negative impact. 

It is clear that not only FC Barcelona, but also the vast majority of institutions and companies in the world of sport and other areas of society are directly suffering from this situation. But before the crisis began, Barca was on very solid financial ground. Even in February, the club was ahead of the budgeted revenue for this season. 

Obviously, the situation will be very different now, but the club is already implementing a series of measures to make the economic impact as small as possible.

As for the budget for next season, I think it is still too early to say as there are still so many uncertainties as to what the future scenario will be.

GT: Why did the club decide to sell the Camp Nou's title rights and use the revenue generated in the fight against the virus, especially as the entire football industry is facing financial difficulties? What approaches will the club take to help fight the coronavirus? Have you been working with any companies on related projects? Are there any Chinese companies on the list?

Cardoner: We are aware that Barca has a commitment to society that is part of its identity as "more than a club," and we consider it essential that in these times of humanitarian crisis, everything that the club has should be used to help fight the coronavirus pandemic and its consequences. 

That is why the club has decided to transfer the title rights of the Camp Nou to the Barca Foundation so that it can start looking for a sponsor and allocate all the proceeds to the fight against the pandemic through research projects and programs aimed at combating its negative effects. 

The funds provided by the sponsor will be divided between a project to fight COVID-19 proposed by the sponsor itself and other projects that are being developed in parallel and which will be selected by a monitoring committee at the club.

But apart from this initiative, the club, also through the Barca Foundation, has been working with different institutions and companies. 

Many of these collaborations have been with Chinese companies and institutions, which shows what great links Barca has with China and with its fans in the country. For example, there was the action that the club took at a time when China was suffering very intensely from this crisis. 

On February 15, on the occasion of the La Liga match against Getafe, a canvas was unfurled in the center of the Camp Nou with the motto "Stronger Together" and players from both teams came onto the field with boys and girls from the United Chinese Dragons Supporters club wearing a shirt with the motto in English and another message of encouragement to the Chinese people in their own language. We also sent shirts printed with this motto to Chinese fans.

And now, this show of solidarity has been reciprocated and we have received help from several Chinese companies, for example, Tencent, which through the Tencent Charity Foundation provided personal protective equipment (PPE) for hospitals and healthcare professionals. And Taiping Life Insurance, a regional partner of the club, donated more than 30,000 masks to the Catalan health authorities. 

Haikou's Barca Experience has also put on sale limited edition shirts from the "Stronger Together" Campaign to raise funds to support the medical supplies being donated by our regional partner in this project, Mission Hills Group. 

GT: The Chinese Government has helped Spain with some medical supplies. In your opinion, what are the areas in which greater cooperation between China and Spain is required in matters of pandemic prevention and control?

Cardoner: In order to overcome a pandemic like the one we are suffering, we need the utmost international cooperation and for all governments and institutions from all over the world to work to support the fight against this crisis. 

I believe that there must be a single goal, to overcome this crisis from a health point of view but also from a social and economic point of view. 

And that is why we need collaboration between all countries, also in the field of prevention of further outbreaks. 

China was the country that first suffered from this situation and surely its experience can be very useful to the rest of the world.
Newspaper headline: Stronger together