Biography | Ferran Reverter — The Due Diligence Hour in Auditori 1899

On 6 October 2021, just after noon, Ferran Reverter Planet stood in the Auditori 1899 at Camp Nou and walked the press through the club's books.

The room is a 225-square-metre auditorium next to the mixed zone and the dressing rooms, fitted with 135 seats.

Joan Laporta and several directors sat with him. Mundo Deportivo ran a live tick from 12:03, when the CEO began.

The exercise had a name the club used in public: the due diligence of the 2020-21 season, plus a budget for 2021-22.

Figures that appeared in the same day's Catalan and Spanish papers included 631 million euros of income against 1,136 million of expenses for that closed year, and a Covid impact the club put at 92 million under LaLiga rules.

Reverter told the room the inherited net equity was negative. He described a viability plan, a shift of debt from short to long tenor, and a cut to the sporting wage bill.

He also listed fabric problems at the stadium itself: more than 900 recorded defects, 124 of them classed as urgent.

Those claims were the club's own presentation, given on the record in this auditorium. They are not repeated here as courtroom findings.

The same autumn he took the Espai Barça financing case to the members. In December 2021 they approved a rebuilt campus plan in the first online referendum in the club's history.

On 8 February 2022 the club announced his resignation, effective once a successor was named. The official reason was personal and family. Contemporary papers also described a break with Laporta over the Spotify shirt and stadium-naming talks.

The pin is the auditorium of 6 October, the one public hour when the new CEO put numbers on a screen inside the ground.

Photo: Camp Nou, public domain aerial, via Wikimedia Commons