Biography | Ferran Reverter — First Economics Class in This Balmes Building

People treat Ferran Reverter Planet as a German-retail import who arrived at FC Barcelona already formed.

The first credential was a new public university that had just opened on this block.

On 8 October 1990, Universitat Pompeu Fabra held its first lectures at the Balmes building, Carrer de Balmes 132-134.

The Generalitat had bought the old Jesuit Fòrum Vergés that year and handed it to a university created by Catalan law on 18 June 1990.

Three hundred and sixteen first-year students of Law and of Economic and Business Sciences sat in those rooms.

Reverter, born in Barcelona in 1972, was in that economics cohort.

The club later recorded the degree as completed in 1994.

The building itself is older than the university.

Enric Sagnier designed it in 1926 as a commercial school.

After 1953 it was a Jesuit cultural centre.

A 1992 annex at Balmes 134 enlarged the block.

From 1997 the same rooms housed the university's continuing-education institute, now the UPF Barcelona School of Management.

The pin is on a public campus building, not a private address.

He trained as an economist in a university that was itself a start-up, in a city that was still finishing the Olympic rebuild.

That is the formation the later MediaMarkt and Camp Nou jobs rest on.

A later IESE management-development programme, dated 2002 by the club, came after the family firm and just as he entered MediaMarkt.

The Balmes classrooms are the earlier, dated start.

Photo: Pere prlpz, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons