Laporta shrugs off the flak and cruises to re-election as Barcelona president | Sid Lowe

Joan Laporta accompanied his players from the football pitch to the polling station, singing and winning all the way. From his seat high in tribuna, Barcelona’s outgoing president – who was about to become their incoming president – watched them beat Sevilla 5-2 and then headed back down to his place in the 995-capacity marquee outside the new Camp Nou. There, surrounded by cameras and positioned by table 11, he watched them help him defeat Victor Font even more comprehensively: 68.18% to 29.78%. It was a little before 7.30pm on election Sunday, still early, still not quite time to crack open the champagne or light up the cigar, but it was done. It had been from the start.

“We’re 100% focused on the game,” Hansi Flick had said before playing Sevilla this weekend, a line which seemed to set him and his players apart a little from everyone else in Catalonia, but once their primary duty had been fulfilled, his team victorious and four points clear again, they could complete another. Standing there with his passport in hand and Laporta helping ensure he was passed the correct slip, the coach slotted a little white envelope into the box. And then, his vote cast in Barcelona’s 2026 presidential elections, another new experience embraced here, Laporta took his arm, raised it like a prizefighter, the identification complete, and began a chant: “Hansi Flick! Hansi Flick!”

Flick was the first to arrive from the football staff, quietly slipping out of the marquee and the madness again as others followed him in, caught up somewhere in the crowd. Fermín López and Dani Olmo came in their Barcelona tracksuits, Raphinha in all black, including the shades. Next came Pedri, Marc Casadó and Marc Bernal. Gerard Martín and Pau Cubarsí; Gavi and Ronald Araújo. Laporta hugged them all, beaming, pressure applied, the crowd singing Barça’s anthem and soon chanting “President! President!”, the president-elect’s fist pumping with the beat. More than a dozen first-team footballers voted. One publicly didn’t: Marc-André ter Stegen arrived to find that he had forgotten to keep his membership dues up to date.

Sergio Busquets had already been, so had Xavi Hernández, although Laporta had no effusive greeting for the latter. Aitana Bonmatí went, Alexia Putellas couldn’t: she was in La Coruña scoring against Deportivo. There was Jordi Pujol, former president of the Catalan government, who is 94. Johan Cruyff’s widow Danny kissed her envelope before depositing it, Laporta hugging her. Basketball coach Xavi Pascual came too and they were not alone: 114,504 members were registered to vote in the elections, all of them in person: 95,562 in Barcelona, 5,011 in Girona, 4,086 in Tarragona, 1,895 in Lleida and 705 in Andorra. In the end, 48,480 did; 30,184 voted for Laporta, returning him to the presidency, and 14,385 for Font. The president, who had stepped down in early February to call elections, will be formally sworn back in again on 1 July.

At less than 35% of the electorate, this was the lowest turnout since 1997, but the crowds were constant across a day that’s an event, a reaffirmation, as well as an opportunity to exercise a right – and while politics is a messy, dirty business, democracy does makes a football club feel different, however flawed.

Polls opened at 9am, Laporta voting at 9.20 and not going until long after they closed at 9pm, a charismatic presence his opponent simply couldn’t match. There were were babies to hold, selfies to take, songs to sing and, somewhere in the middle of it, at 4.15pm a football match broke out.

Laporta watched it from a now familiar spot at the back of the stand, his place in the presidential box abandoned and the games more enjoyable for it: let loose to chant, bounce and deliver the occasional up yours. With Phase 1C finally cleared, the North Goal end opened and the lower rings completed, 56,482 others joined him in seeing Raphinha score a Panenka, the first of two penalties en route to a hat-trick. They watched Olmo and João Cancelo get the others; a first start for Xavi Espart, another 18-year-old; and half an hour of Lamine Yamal, protected for Newcastle on Wednesday. Better still, they saw eight minutes of Gavi, 203 long, painful days later. They saw Barcelona win the match, which they tend to – since the Camp Nou reopened, they have played 12 games here and won them all – and Laporta win the elections, which was no real surprise either. Only the margin of victory might have been: the biggest in the club’s history.

At midnight, declared the winner, Laporta headed out to find a Mariachi band waiting for him, so he started singing again. Three hours later, he arrived at Luz de Gas, his nightclub of choice going back two decades. Now it really was time to light up that cigar and open the cava. The leader of the elefant blau pressure group that challenged Josep Lluis Núñez in the late 1990s – the only elected president to have been in power longer – Laporta was a young, dynamic anti-establishment figure, ushering in a new age back then. Now he had done it again. By the time this mandate ends, he will have been president for 17 years across two spells, starting in 2003.

Font, the only opposition figure to gather enough signatures to make the cut and stand against him, had described Laporta during the campaign as the best president the club had ever had … and also the worst. He had gone, Font said, from being their Kennedy to being their Trump.

Font campaigned on Barcelona’s financial difficulties and Laporta’s famous “levers”, the sale of future assets for immediate income. He talked about Barcelona still not having reached “1:1,” that point where there’s sufficient economic balance to allow you to spend a euro for every euro you make, and the issues registering players, Olmo in particular.

He cited a lack of transparency, the commissions paid, the opaque business partners chosen, and the legal cases pending. He attacked the departures of Lionel Messi, Xavi Hernández and a dozen directors, the Camp Nou delays and its cost, way over the initial €900m budget, and the presence of Alejandro Echevarría, Laporta’s brother-in-law and powerbroker with no post but links to the Fundacíon Francisco Franco. This was a referendum on Laporta, a judgment, he said: Laporta yes or Laporta no.

Barcelona voted Laporta yes, and overwhelmingly so. Font had the presentations but none of the presence, even when he went on the attack. Get Laporta on the campaign trail and he has no match, certainly not Font, who never convinced: sure, he seemed sensible enough, most said, but who wants sensible? Popular and a populist, Laporta is seen as one of them, living it like they do: sitting through the pouring rain at the Camp Nou, still singing; bouncing when the chant goes round saying that anyone who doesn’t is a Madridista; riding a forklift truck at a market; stirring pasta at a supporters’ club and declaring: “Less PowerPoint, more macaroni.”

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Seemingly indestructible, a survivor and a politician, bold and relentlessly positive, none of it got to him. Not the Negreira case, in which they had secretly paid the vice-president of the referees’ committee – that was turned back on Real Madrid, without apology – not even the accommodation with Madrid and the Super League. He had managed to get out in time, left projecting the look of someone who had played Florentino Pérez. This, remember, was the man who had announced his intention to return with a gigantic billboard by the Bernabéu declaring: “Looking forward to seeing you again.” Accusations became evidence instead of an external enemy, of his strength and ballsiness, something that many buy into, binding them to him rather than breaking the bond. Why should they care what anyone else says? “Against everyone and everything,” went the line, Laporta as defender of the faith.

Even an astonishing interview in which Xavi turned on him during the campaign, insisting it was time the “truth” got out, hurt Xavi more than Laporta. Messi, who Xavi mentioned, claiming Laporta had blocked the Argentinian’s return out of a desire not to lessen his power, might have agreed with Xavi but maintained a discreet silence. Lamine Yamal, meanwhile, posted a picture with the president.

And yet it’s not just electioneering, which can come as an easy, empty accusation. It’s also the football: in 2015, when Laporta lost to Josep Maria Bartomeu, Barcelona had just won the treble and now Font lamented: “The ball and the results weighed heavy.” Which, surely, they’re supposed to? And it is not like it was easier getting there.

The original lever every club pulls in times of financial trouble is the players, the team weakening, but Laporta went the other way: that takes audacity, he said, and if some see it as foolishness, a gigantic gamble, no one does audacity like him.

One thing that they could not campaign against was the one thing that matters most, maybe the only thing that truly does. Victory was about, well, victory: about the team Laporta built back then – possibly the best they have ever had – the team he inherited the second time and the team he has now, going from Braithwaite, Trincão and Sergiño Dest to the side that won a treble last season and is top again now.

A young exciting side with perhaps the best player in the world and under a manager who makes football fun. Flick also made it clear his future is linked to the president who on Sunday afternoon sat in the Camp Nou alongside almost 60,000 fans watching his players beat Sevilla 5-2 then stood at table 11 as they came out to vote.