BARCELONA – “Xavi will come to Barça if I win the elections. If he doesn’t show up, I promise to pay for all members’ subscriptions out of pocket. Víctor Font gave his first media impact of the pre-election Barcelona campaign by publicly pledging to include Xavi if he is elected president on January 24. With crystal clear clarity and echoing Florentino Pérez’s old chapter in the 2000 Real Madrid elections when he promised to sign Luis Figo or, otherwise, pay for the subscription of all members of the merengue club.
The leader of the Sí al Futur team took this step forward during an interview with a satirical sports radio program targeting the Barça club, La Sotana, ready to dispel any doubts that returned to the plane last week, when he himself took Xavi distance from the election campaign and stated that “I don’t want to be proactive about any candidate.”
Font was betting hard at a time when all of his rivals were taking advantage of Xavi’s statements to remove him from his project, as was Joan Laporta when he said it seemed ‘strange’ that the Catalan coach had committed to a candidacy or Xavi Vilajoana, who presented him as “an asset to the club” and ruled that “appropriating him, like any other, is a mistake. His name should not be part of a presidential election.”
Víctor Font’s statement takes as a reference the strategy that Florentino Pérez pursued in the summer of 2000, when he won his first Real Madrid presidency election, by promising that if he was the most voted candidate (he faced Lorenzo Sanz ) would sign Luis Figo, captain and the highest standard of Barça at the time. The disbelief of his promise in the Bernabeu area prompted Florentino to publicly commit to paying for the subscription of all white club members if the Portuguese did not ultimately sign for Madrid.