Waiting for the miracle

Every time Barça announces a date for returning to its stadium, the prediction fails. Now it announces that we'll be returning home on August 10th, with the slogan, arguable from a linguistic rigor standpoint, to "vibrate." This is the institutional announcement that, unusually, turns president Joan Laporta into the silent superhero symbolizing the club's sporting audacity and financial recklessness.

Choosing a president as advertising bait is an innovative move. The ad then exploits classic epic resources: the beauty and generosity of the good Blaugrana fans (the detestable Culés aren't that photogenic) and the timpani of El Bruc, one of our most versatile patriotic clichés. And, connecting with new trends, it formalizes the stridency through a rave 's loudspeaker wall. It is, I interpret, the vibration that will unite us and that, spurred on by the satanic energy of the speaker, will lead us to the deafness that will allow us to ignore certain truths and lies.

Choosing a president as a publicity stunt is an innovative move.

Yesterday, in La Vanguardia , Anaïs Martí Herrero interviewed the institutional vice president Elena Fort, who commented on the commitment of August 10 with more caution than when, in April 2024, she was willing to bet that we would return home on November 29 (of last year).

Since I no longer trust either euphoric slogans or structural pessimism, I'm going to take a walk around the stadium to see how things are going. At 8 a.m., there's no construction activity (it's Sunday), only the agonizing footsteps of amateur athletes, visibly suffocated, can be heard wandering around the area. The landscape is impressive: the cranes are following an unfathomable tactic, protecting the skeleton of a stadium that, at first glance, invites you to bet that no game will be played here on August 10th.

The static advertising by the construction company, Limak, isn't grandiloquent. The fact that the skeleton of the stadium's structure is so evident forces us to stretch our imagination and consider that, in just six weeks, it will be difficult to reverse reality. Around the perimeter, the window of Barça's Casal de l'Avi, displaying books published in collaboration with the club, a family of tourists taking photos in front of an advertisement for "Passió pel Barça," and, at the churrería, an overweight columnist, with a guilty look, violating the ban on churros.

It's clear that the coming weeks will serve to polarize the debate, intensify relations between the club and the City Council (the permit provider and virtuoso of recreational bureaucracy), and foster interpretations in which adhering to or disagreeing with the official version will keep the flames of victimhood and intransigence alive.

I look at the ad again. I'm once again surprised by how much President Laporta personalizes this return to his father's house. What remains, as an experience that will also be devoured by our memory, is the role of Montjuïc and the 22,000 heroes who endured the club's arbitrary handling of their season tickets. And also a certain symbolic condescension that, by a twist of fate, has consolidated a new way of cheering and the spirit of what Ramon Besa defines as the "Montjuïc generation." Will we miss Montjuïc? I don't rule it out. But if on August 10 Barça manages to play the Gamper in its new stadium (I'm reluctant to use the official name), Laporta will be able to boast of having presided over—I'd say it's not the first—another miracle.