FUTBOL CLUB BARCELONA, 125 YEARS OF GREAT HISTORY

On a day like today in 1899, Futbol Club Barcelona was founded.

 

The Grandma and Claire Fontaine live in Barcelona and they are two eternal fans of this club since they were born. They want to celebrate this great 125 anniversary. 

Long live Futbol Club Barcelona!

Visca el Barça i Visca Catalunya!

Futbol Club Barcelona, known simply as Barcelona and colloquially as Barça, is a professional football club based in Barcelona, Catalonia.

Founded in 1899 by a group of Swiss, English and Catalan footballers led by Joan Gamper, the club has become a symbol of Catalan culture and Catalanism, hence the motto Més que un club, More than a club. The official Barcelona anthem is the Cant del Barça, written by Jaume Picas and Josep Maria Espinàs.

Barcelona is one of the most widely supported teams in the world, and the club has one of the largest social media following in the world among sports teams. Barcelona players have won a record number of Ballon d'Or awards, with recipients including Johan Cruyff, as well as a record number of FIFA World Player of the Year 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 club to win the continental treble consisting of La Liga, Copa del Rey, and the UEFA Champions League, and also became the first football club to win six out of six competitions in a single year, by also winning the Spanish Super Cup, UEFA Super Cup and FIFA Club World Cup. 

In 2011, the club became European champions again and won five trophies. This Barcelona team, which won 14 trophies in just 4 years under Pep Guardiola, is considered by some in the sport to be the greatest team of all time. By winning their fifth Champions League trophy on 6 June 2015, Barcelona became the first European club in history to achieve the continental treble twice. It is also the highest paid sports team ever.

More information: Futbol Club Barcelona

On 22 October 1899, Hans Gamper placed an advertisement in Los Deportes declaring his wish to form a football club; a positive response resulted in a meeting at the Gimnasio Solé on 29 November. Eleven players attended -Walter Wild (the first director of the club), Lluís d'Ossó, Bartomeu Terradas, Otto Kunzle, Otto Maier, Enric Ducal, Pere Cabot, Carles Pujol, Josep Llobet, John Parsons, and William Parsons- and Foot-Ball Club Barcelona was born. Officially, Futbol Club Barcelona was founded on 29 November 1899 as Foot-Ball Club Barcelona.

FC Barcelona had a successful start in regional and national cups, competing in the Campionat de Catalunya and the Copa del Rey. In 1902, the club won its first trophy, the Copa Macaya. 

Hans Gamper

In 1908, Hans Gamper, now known as Joan Gamper, became club president in a desperate attempt to save Barcelona from extinction, finding the club struggling not just on the pitch, but also financially and socially, after not winning a competition since the Campionat de Catalunya in 1905. 

He said in a meeting, Barcelona cannot die and must not die. If there is nobody who is going to try, then I will assume the responsibility of running the club from now on." Club president on five separate occasions between 1908 and 1925, he spent 25 years in total at the helm. One of his main achievements was ensuring Barça acquire its own stadium and thus generate a stable income.

On 14 March 1909, the team moved into the Camp de la Indústria, a stadium with a capacity of 8,000. To celebrate their new surroundings, the club conducted a logo contest the following year. Carles Comamala won the contest, and his suggestion became the crest that the club still wears, with some minor changes, as of the present day.

With the new stadium, Barcelona participated in the inaugural version of the Pyrenees Cup, which, at the time, consisted of the best teams of Languedoc, Midi and Aquitaine, the Basque Country and Catalonia. The contest was the most prestigious in that era. From the inaugural year in 1910 to 1913, Barcelona won the competition four consecutive times.

More information: Hans Max Gamper-Haessig, More than a founder

During the same period, the club changed its official language from Castilian to Catalan and gradually evolved into an important symbol of Catalan identity. For many fans, participating in the club had less to do with the game itself and more with being a part of the club's collective identity.

Gamper simultaneously launched a campaign to recruit more club members, and by 1922, the club had more than 20,000, who helped finance a new stadium. The club then moved to the new Les Corts, which they inaugurated the same year. Les Corts had an initial capacity of 30,000, and in the 1940s it was expanded to 60,000.

The Stadium was closed as a reprisal

Gamper recruited Jack Greenwell as the first full-time manager in Barcelona's history. After this hiring, the club's fortunes began to improve on the field. During the Gamper-led era, Barcelona won eleven Campionats de Catalunya, six Copa del Rey and four Pyrenees Cups and enjoyed its first golden age.

On 14 June 1925, in a spontaneous reaction against Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, the crowd in the stadium jeered the Royal March. As a reprisal, the ground was closed for six months and Gamper was forced to relinquish the presidency of the club. This coincided with the transition to professional football, and, in 1926, the directors of Barcelona publicly claimed, for the first time, to operate a professional football club.

On 30 July 1930, Gamper committed suicide after a period of depression brought on by personal and financial problems.

Although they continued to have players of the standing of Josep Escolà, the club now entered a period of decline, in which political conflict overshadowed sports throughout society. Attendance at matches dropped as the citizens of Barcelona were occupied with discussing political matters. Although the team won the Campionat de Catalunya in 1930, 1931, 1932, 1934, 1936 and 1938, success at a national level, with the exception of the 1937 disputed title, evaded them.

A month after the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, several players from Barcelona enlisted in the ranks of those who fought against the military uprising, along with players from Athletic Bilbao.

Josep Sunyol

On 6 August, Falangist soldiers near Guadarrama murdered club president Josep Sunyol, a representative of the pro-independence political party. He was dubbed the martyr of barcelonisme, and his murder was a defining moment in the history of FC Barcelona and Catalan identity. 

In the summer of 1937, the squad was on tour in Mexico and the United States, where it was received as an ambassador of the Second Spanish Republic. The tour led to the financial security of the club, but also resulted in half of the team seeking asylum in Mexico and France, making it harder for the remaining team to contest for trophies.

On 16 March 1938, Barcelona came under aerial bombardment from the Italian Air Force, causing more than 3,000 deaths, with one of the bombs hitting the club's offices.

A few months later, Catalonia came under occupation and as a symbol of the undisciplined Catalanism, the club, now down to just 3,486 members, faced a number of restrictions. 

All signs of regional nationalism, including language, flag and other signs of separatism were banned throughout Spain. The Catalan flag was banned and the club were prohibited from using non-Spanish names. These measures forced the club to change its name to Club de Fútbol Barcelona and to remove the Catalan flag from its crest.

In 1943, Barcelona faced rivals Real Madrid in the semi-finals of Copa del Generalísimo, now the Copa del Rey. The first match at Les Corts was won by Barcelona 3–0. Real Madrid comfortably won the second leg, beating Barcelona 11–1. According to football writer Sid Lowe, There have been relatively few mentions of the game since and it is not a result that has been particularly celebrated in Madrid. Indeed, the 11–1 occupies a far more prominent place in Barcelona's history. This was the game that first formed the identification of Madrid as the team of the dictatorship and Barcelona as its victims. It has been alleged by local journalist Paco Aguilar that Barcelona's players were threatened by police in the changing room, though nothing was ever proven.

László Kubala

With Helenio Herrera as coach, a young Luis Suárez, the European Footballer of the Year in 1960, and two influential Hungarians recommended by László Kubala, Sándor Kocsis and Zoltán Czibor, the team won another national double in 1959 and a La Liga and Fairs Cup double in 1960. In 1961, they became the first club to beat Real Madrid in a European Cup play-off. However, they lost 2–3 to Benfica in the final.

The 1960s were less successful for the club, with Real Madrid monopolising La Liga. The completion of the Camp Nou, finished in 1957, meant the club had little money to spend on new players. The 1960s saw the emergence of Josep Maria Fusté and Carles Rexach, and the club won the Copa del Generalísimo in 1963 and the Fairs Cup in 1966. Barcelona restored some pride by beating Real Madrid 1–0 in the 1968 Copa del Generalísimo final at the Santiago Bernabéu in front of Francisco Franco, with coach Salvador Artigas, a former republican pilot in the Civil War.

With the end of Franco's dictatorship in 1974, the club changed its official name back to Futbol Club Barcelona and reverted the crest to its original design, including the original letters once again.

More information: ESPN

The 1973–74 season saw the arrival of Johan Cruyff. Already an established player with Ajax, Cruyff quickly won over the Barcelona fans when he told the European press that he chose Barcelona over Real Madrid because he could not play for a club associated with Francisco Franco. He further endeared himself when he named his son Jordi, after the local Catalan Saint George.

Next to champions like Juan Manuel Asensi, Carles Rexach and Hugo Sotil, he helped the club win the 1973–74 season for the first time since 1960, defeating Real Madrid 5–0 at the Santiago Bernabéu en route. He was crowned European Footballer of the Year in 1973 during his first season with Barcelona, his second Ballon d'Or win; he won his first while playing for Ajax in 1971. Cruyff received this prestigious award a third time, the first player to do so, in 1974, while he was still with Barcelona.

Johan Cruyff

In 1988, Johan Cruyff returned to the club, this time as manager and he assembled what would later be dubbed the Dream Team.

It was ten years after the inception of the youth programme, La Masia, when the young players began to graduate and play for their first team. One of the first graduates, who would later earn international acclaim, was future Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola. Under Cruyff's guidance, Barcelona won four consecutive La Liga titles from 1991 to 1994. They beat Sampdoria in both the 1989 UEFA Cup Winners' Cup final and the 1992 European Cup final at Wembley, with a free kick goal from Dutch international Ronald Koeman. They also won a Copa del Rey in 1990, the European Super Cup in 1992 and three Supercopa de España trophies. With 11 trophies, Cruyff became the club's most successful manager at that point.

On the legacy of Cruyff's football philosophy and the passing style of play he introduced to the club, future coach of Barcelona Pep Guardiola would state, Cruyff built the cathedral, our job is to maintain and renovate it.

More information: Johan Cruyff Foundation

Barcelona B youth manager Pep Guardiola took became the new manager in 2007. Guardiola brought with him the now famous tiki-taka style of play he had been taught during his time in the Barcelona youth teams. Leo Messi has become the star of this new century.

Barça beat Athletic Bilbao 4–1 in the 2009 Copa del Rey Final, winning the competition for a record-breaking 25th time. A historic 2–6 victory against Real Madrid followed three days later and ensured that Barcelona became 2008–09 La Liga champions. Barça finished the season by beating Manchester United 2–0 at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, with goals from Eto'o and Messi, to win their third Champions League title, and complete the first ever treble.

The team went on to win the 2009 Supercopa de España against Athletic Bilbao and the 2009 UEFA Super Cup against Shakhtar Donetsk, becoming the first European club to win both domestic and European Super Cups following a treble. In December 2009, Barcelona won the 2009 Club World Cup. Guardiola represents the new golden age of Barça.

Pep Guardiola & Leo Messi

The nickname culé for a Barcelona supporter is derived from the Catalan cul, in English arse, as the spectators at the first stadium, Camp de la Indústria, sat with their culs over the stand.

The club's original crest was a quartered diamond-shaped crest topped by the Crown of Aragon and the bat of Jaume I, King James, and surrounded by two branches, one of a laurel tree and the other a palm. The club shared Barcelona's coat of arms, as a demonstration of its identification with the city and a desire to be recognised as one.

In 1910, the club held a competition among its members to design a new crest. The winner was Carles Comamala, who at the time played for the club. Comamala's suggestion became the crest that the club wears today, with some minor variations. The crest consists of the St George Cross in the upper-left corner with the Catalan flag beside it, and the team colours at the bottom.

Several competing theories have been put forth for the blue and red design of the Barcelona shirt. The son of the first president, Arthur Witty, claimed it was the idea of his father as the colours were the same as the Merchant Taylor's School team. In Catalonia the common perception is that the colours were chosen by Joan Gamper and are those of his home team, FC Basel. The club's most frequently used change colours have been yellow and orange. An away kit featuring the red and yellow stripes of the flag of Catalonia has also been used many times.

More information: Messi

At Barcelona, I had the best players ever, 

and they helped me to be a successful manager. 

Pep Guardiola