FC Barcelona

Més que un club

Futbol Club Barcelona, commonly known as FC Barcelona and colloquially as Barça, is a professional football club based in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, that competes in La Liga, the top division of Spanish football. Founded in 1899 by a group of Swiss, Catalan, German, and English footballers led by Joan Gamper, the club has become a symbol of Catalan culture and Catalanism, hence the motto Més que un club. Unlike many other football clubs, the supporters own and operate Barcelona. It is the third-most valuable football club in the world, worth $5.6 billion, and the world's fourth richest football club in terms of revenue, with an annual turnover of €800.1 million. The official Barcelona anthem is the Cant del Barça, written by and Josep Maria Espinàs. Barcelona traditionally play in dark shades of blue and garnet stripes, hence nicknamed Blaugrana.

Quick Facts

Competition type: UEFA Champions League
Primary venues: Camp Nou

Lore & Background

Barcelona are one of the world's most decorated clubs. Domestically, Barcelona has won a record 77 trophies: 29 La Liga, 31 Copa del Rey, 2 Copa de la Liga, 16 Supercopa de España and 3 Copa Eva Duarte titles, as well as being the record holder for the latter four competitions. In international club football, Barça has won 22 European and worldwide titles: five UEFA Champions League titles, a record four UEFA Cup Winners' Cups, a record three Inter-Cities Fairs Cups, five UEFA Super Cups, a joint record two Latin Cups and three FIFA Club World Cups.

Barcelona was ranked first in the International Federation of Football History & Statistics Club World Ranking for 1997, 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2015, and occupies the ninth position on the UEFA club rankings. The club has a long-standing rivalry with Real Madrid, and matches between the two teams are referred to as El Clásico. Barcelona is one of the most widely supported teams in the world, and the club has one of the largest social media followings in the world among sports teams.

Barcelona players have won a joint record twelve Ballon d'Or awards, with recipients including Johan Cruyff, as well as a record six FIFA World Player of the Year awards, with winners including Romário, Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi. In 2010, three players who came through the club's youth academy—Lionel Messi, Andrés Iniesta and Xavi—were chosen as the three best players in the world in the Ballon d'Or ranking, an unprecedented feat for players from the same football academy.

Additionally, players representing the club have won a record eight European Golden Shoe awards. Barcelona is one of three founding members of the Primera División that have never been relegated from the top division since its inception in 1929, along with Athletic Bilbao and Real Madrid. In 2009, Barcelona became the first Spanish club to win the continental treble consisting of La Liga, and UEFA Champions League titles, and also became the first European football club to win six competitions in a single year.

In 2011, the club became European champions again, winning five trophies. This Barcelona team, which won fourteen trophies in just four years under manager Pep Guardiola, is considered by some in the sport to be the greatest of all time.

Reader's Guide

The club was founded on 22 October 1899 when Swiss Hans Gamper placed an advertisement in Los Deportes declaring his wish to form a football club. A meeting at the Gimnasio Solé on 29 November resulted in eleven players forming Foot-Ball Club Barcelona. Barcelona had a successful start in regional and national cups. In 1901, the club participated in the first football competition played on the Iberian Peninsula, the Copa Macaya, narrowly losing to Hispania AC, but in the following year, Barça won the tournament, the club's first-ever piece of silverware.

In 1908, Hans Gamper – now known as Joan Gamper – became club president, preventing Barcelona from shutting down. On 14 March 1909, the team moved into the Camp de la Indústria. Carles Comamala won a logo contest in 1910, and his suggestion became the crest that the club still wears. The club grew in the 1910s, winning three successive Campionats de Catalunya between 1909 and 1911, three Copa del Rey in four years between 1910 and 1913, and four successive Pyrenees Cup between 1910 and 1913.

In 1917, Jack Greenwell became the club's first full-time coach. During the same period, the club changed its official language from Castilian to Catalan. By 1922, the club had more than 20,000 members, who helped finance a new stadium, Les Corts. In 1912, Gamper recruited Paulino Alcántara.

Under Greenwell, the team won nine out of ten Campionats de Catalunya between 1919 and 1928 and two Copa del Rey titles in 1920 and 1922. On 14 June 1925, the crowd jeered the Royal March, leading to the ground being closed for six months and Gamper forced to relinquish the presidency. The first time the directors of Barcelona publicly claimed to operate a professional football club was in 1926.