In his sparsely decorated corner office overlooking the field at Estadio Monumental, Juan Alfredo Cuentas sought to explain the power of the brand he had inherited as Barcelona Sporting Club’s new vice president for finance. Outside, the once-manicured grass lay vacant for the offseason, slowly spoiling in the January heat.
“It’s on par with a Coca-Cola, a Samsung or a Pepsi,” he said of his team. “It’s the strongest and most talked about brand in the country, and it generates headlines every day.”
For most soccer fans around the globe, the name Barcelona is synonymous with the likes of Lionel Messi, Neymar and Luis Suárez; huge financial resources; and Champions League triumphs that have often made Spain the king of the sport. But in Ecuador, the name Barcelona is usually associated with the 90-year-old soccer club founded here in Guayaquil, the country’s largest city.
The two teams are very different, of course, but in at least a few ways they are alike.
For one thing, Barcelona Sporting Club, which was founded by Catalans, has a team logo modeled on that of its Spanish counterpart. And at least within Ecuador, how the immensely popular Barcelona Sporting Club does on the field resonates around the country in the same manner that the achievements and occasional failures of Messi & Company touch all of Spain.
“For all the people who say that in Spain exists the great Barcelona, the original Barcelona, here in Ecuador, the name Barcelona is something very sacred within our own football,” said Carlos Víctor Morales, a popular soccer commentator in Guayaquil.
“People love, hate, suffer, cry and celebrate according to Barcelona’s results,” he added.
Ronald Ladines, who covers the Ecuadorean version of Barcelona for El Comercio, one of the country’s largest newspapers, was succinct in his appraisal of the team’s significance, saying, “Barcelona is football in Ecuador.”
He added, for good measure, and maybe with a little exaggeration, “A championship game without Barcelona isn’t a championship.”
By most accounts, Barcelona Sporting Club rose to prominence in 1949, when the soccer landscape in Ecuador was largely dominated by amateur provincial clubs. In August of that year, Barcelona Sporting Club faced off against the Colombian team Millonarios, then considered to be one of the world’s premier professional clubs, in a charity match to support the victims of an earthquake in the Andean city Ambato.
Barcelona, which at the time featured only Ecuadorean players, upset Millonarios, 3-2, drawing national attention.
“This was a time when Ecuadorean football was more accustomed to landslide defeats,” said Ricardo Castellano, a soccer historian who is affiliated with the Barcelona Sporting Club museum here. The victory over Millonarios, he said, marked the beginning of something new.
The top Ecuadorean league (later known as the Serie A) took shape in the late 1950s. As Barcelona Sporting Club began to recruit foreign players regularly in the early 1960s, it solidified itself as the top force in the league, and, to date, it has won a league-leading 14 championships, although only one in the past 18 years.
Other international matches also contributed to Barcelona’s rising popularity in Ecuador, including a 1962 game against Pelé and his Brazilian club Santos, and multiple appearances in the Copa Libertadores, the Latin American club championship.
Over the years, the two Barcelonas have occasionally crossed paths on and off the field. In late 2012, Spain’s Barcelona tried to register its brand in Ecuador for marketing and other purposes, throwing into question Barcelona Sporting Club’s rights to its own name and logo. But an agreement was reached between the teams in 2014 that allowed for the brands to coexist in Ecuador. The clubs have also played each other three times, although not since 1988. Each team has a victory and a draw.
But as FC Barcelona has emerged as one of the most successful clubs in the world over the past decade, Barcelona Sporting Club — which is run as a nonprofit — has found itself struggling through a litany of financial problems and poor performances on the field that would be unimaginable for its Spanish counterpart.
The heart of the Ecuador team’s problems is a significant debt burden accrued by successive management groups since the early 2000s. Barcelona’s financial woes turned into a crisis in the 2015 season (in Ecuador, the season runs within a calendar year, currently February to December) when management, then led by Antonio Noboa, a member of one of Ecuador’s most prominent business families, failed to make several months’ worth of salary payments to its players. That prompted the Ecuadorean Football Federation to dock the team points.
Morale among the players ran low and Barcelona sputtered to a distant fourth-place finish in the Serie A. To make matters worse, the team’s chief rival, Emelec, won its third straight championship and 13th overall, pulling one back of Barcelona.
“The difficult economic situation reflected itself in the team’s performance on the field last season,” Guillermo Almada, Barcelona’s manager, said in an interview in Río Verde, on the northern coast of Ecuador, where the team is holding its preseason training camp. “I have no doubt.”
In October, the club’s nearly 4,000 members — they pay a monthly fee to maintain that status — voted for a change in leadership, electing José Francisco Cevallos as its president. A highly regarded former player nicknamed the Hands of Ecuador for his goalkeeping success with Barcelona during the 1990s and for his play in the World Cup and Copa Libertadores, Cevallos had previously served as the country’s minister of sport.
Cevallos’ first major step was to pay salaries owed to the players and staff for July, August and September, restoring a modicum of confidence in the team’s leadership.
“He understands the world of football from the perspective of the players,” said Iván Hurtado, who heads the country’s players’ union — la Asociación de Futbolistas del Ecuador — and is a former teammate of Cevallos’ on the national team. “We have faith that he can restore Barcelona as a model for others.”
Putting the team on a path to financial stability is likely to be a long-term project.
In an interview with Ecuadorean media in December, Cevallos cautioned that the team’s finances remained “in intensive therapy.”
Cuentas, the new vice president for finance, said the debt stood between $15 million and $20 million, equivalent to about 1 1/2 times the club’s annual revenue. Servicing the debt is expected to account for as much as 20 percent of the team’s 2016 budget, he added. In addition, low oil prices are threatening Ecuador’s economy, which could, in turn, hold down attendance and diminish team revenue.
With all this in mind, Barcelona has hired two outside firms to begin reviewing financial documents and putting together a multiyear payment plan. The club also plans to vastly expand its membership base, hoping to add 10,000 members per year over the next four years.
The new management demonstrated its commitment to frugality this offseason, passing up splashy signings in favor of more modest tinkering with the roster. And in an attempt, perhaps, to compensate for the lack of a high-profile international signing, Barcelona is trying to add some sizzle to its preseason festivities. The club has arranged for fading Brazilian star Ronaldinho, who was once a beloved player at FC Barcelona in Spain, to play for Barcelona Sporting Club in an exhibition game.
For the team’s management, getting Ronaldhino into a Barcelona SC jersey, if only for one game, is a publicity coup and a chance to demonstrate success in an area in which prior club administrations failed. In 1997, for instance, an effort to attract another global star nearing the end of his career — Diego Maradona — never panned out.
Ronaldhino would be the second player to play for both Barcelonas. The first was Carlos Medrano, an Argentine who played for Barcelona Sporting Club in the early 1970s after an earlier stint with the Spanish club.
In Río Verde, the team’s struggles did little to deter hundreds of fans from attending a recent practice. Manuel Espinosa, 47, sat on concrete bleachers coated with dust and swatted away flies as he watched his favorite team settle into the rhythms of its third practice of the day. Dressed in the team’s neon yellow jersey, Espinosa expressed optimism that Cevallos could help return Barcelona to its past glory and professed his loyalty through the current down period.
“For me, Barcelona is my idol, my life passion,” he said. “It runs in my blood.”
Back at the team’s headquarters, Cuentas said the new management was setting its own high expectations.
“Our goal is to restore the name of Barcelona, nationally and internationally, to the status that it always was,” he said, arms folded on his desk. “As the best team in Ecuador."
