The Hesperia mutiny, the rebellion of the Blaugrana squad as a whole against the board of directors headed by Josep Lluís Nuñez, happens to be the great turning point in the history of Barça. An unprecedented crisis in Spanish football that forced a sporting and management turnaround in the club that paved the way for the entity to win the first European Cup – the predecessor of the current Champions League – in 1992.
The story began at the end of the 1986-87 season, when the German Bernd Schuster, who had negotiated his signing for Real Madrid, took Barça to court demanding his termination and compensation for breach of contract. He lost and was forced to remain in the entity until June 1988, until he had signed. But his contract was circulated and he put the Treasury on alert.
Barça players were taxed on their income in two tranches: 60% as a federation contract, at a tax rate of 53%, and 40% as image rights, taxed at 35%. A trap that the Tax Agency wanted to make the players pay, who began a long negotiation with the club. Everything was going well while the team looked for a solution with vice president Joan Gaspart, but Núñez entered the scene to make it clear that there was nothing to negotiate.
On March 28, 1988, the entire Blaugrana squad except Gary Lineker, concentrated with the English team, and Schuster, already with a foot and a half in Madrid, expressed their discomfort with the situation and asked the culé partner to throw out to the street. Núñez in an unexpected press conference at the Hesperia hotel in Les Tres Torres (owned, by the way, by Gaspart). The season was disastrous and neither the Copa del Rey won that same campaign nor the victory against Real Madrid three days after the mutiny convinced the partner, who aligned himself mostly with the board.
Winner of the pulse, Núñez cleaned up at the end of the season by signing 13 players (López Rekarte, Txiki Begiristain, Bakero, Julio Salinas, Eusebio, Soler, Valverde, Manolo Hierro, Goikoetxea, Unzué, Serna, Romerito and Aloisio), dismissing him as coach Luis Aragonés to sign Johan Cruyff and renewing those that the new coach considered necessary, even though some had led the mutiny (Alexanco, Zubizarreta, Carrasco, Julio Alberto, Migueli, Roberto, Salva, Urbano, Cristóbal and Lineker followed) . He was the basis of the team that just four years later would win the main continental title at London's Wembley Stadium.
But the revolution also reached the offices, and Núñez went to look for the professor of the then Faculty of Economic Sciences of the University of Barcelona, Jaime Gil Aluja, to lead this new project from the economic side, an international reference for his studies on fuzzy logic. . He agreed to head the economic commission, although only if he had all the information and power of action and communicated directly with the president.
And this is how the economic rigor imposed by the board of directors from its beginnings left behind the ingenious formulas to focus on the generation of resources, the amortization of debt and investments in players, in that order. Throughout Núñez's presidency, Barça went from a net worth of 13 million pesetas – which a subsequent audit put at negative 32 – to 12,813 in 2000, and atypical income – basically sponsorships and rights – went from representing 15% of the budget to 65% in 2000.
Gil Aluja was not a simple manager who put the Blaugrana's accounts in order. He boosted income with contracts with Kappa and Nike, launched the new Barça Visa and opened La Botiga, important sources of income. Although he was not satisfied with it, since he brought his research to the club to create the first algorithm that was used in professional football. At a time when signings were made by catalog and at the discretion of the presidents, he represented an innovation that the club decided to manage with discretion.
If any discipline could help make decisions in an area as uncertain as football, it was fuzzy logic, capable of analyzing, avoiding both categorical statements and hunches without criteria, which player could best adapt to a position based on the role. that had to be carried out according to the criteria established by the technician.
The first step was none other than what was foreseeable from a sporting point of view: developing the ideal profile of each position on the team in accordance with the game model. It was about identifying the ideal players to occupy each position, those who best fit its definition, choosing a certain number of them and always taking into account, along with these playing characteristics, their economic conditions.
From here, the analysis delved into the psychosocial, physical and technical field, establishing a grading, from 0 to 10, which took into account the assessment of various independent experts. These “notes” evaluated aspects that in the psychosocial block ranged from winning behavior, the relationship with teammates in the locker room, family and couple relationships, mental strength or leadership capacity to the ease of adaptation to new sociocultural environments, the recognition and loyalty to a new club, the intellectual and cultural level or the discipline.
The physical elements were evaluated, also with notes, the background, strength, muscle power, level of recovery, average speed, acceleration or resistance to pain. And as for the technical characteristics, the game with both legs, the vision of the game, the ability to pass, the shot, the recovery, the dribble, the head game... In this case, each position had been made. a specific questionnaire.
The analysis was not only carried out on possible signings, but began with the players of the first team, to determine their degree of suitability, and continued with those of the reserve team and youth football, in order to consider whether the best reinforcements were already there. in the club. Logically, monitoring was also done between the squads of the associated entities and the players that the representatives were offering.
The evaluation carried out using the algorithm not only served to determine whether a player adapted better or worse to his position according to the parameters set by the entity, but also represented the beginning of a path of technicalization, using the term in a broad sense, since that determined in which specific areas and directions I should improve to achieve excellence.
Likewise, this analysis, periodically reformulated, should also help determine which players could perform better depending on the approach that the coach used in each match, depending on the rival or the players he would have to face directly, or even determine which They would be the best changes in a match depending on its development.
They were the years of the signings of Koeman, Laudrup, Stoichkov, Witschge and Nadal, and the promotion from Barça Atlètic of Carles Busquets, Albert Ferrer and Guardiola. All of them went through the algorithm to end up being part of the squad that ended up winning the Blaugrana's first European Cup, a milestone of that new era. From there, the team continued to grow with other additions that also marked an era and laid the foundations for a new Barça, such as Romário, Abelardo, Figo, Ronaldo, Vítor Baía, Luis Enrique, Rivaldo, Kluivert, Frank de Boer, Ronald de Boer... To which was added the promotion of reserve team players such as Sergi Barjuan, Iván de la Peña, Celades, Xavi and Carles Puyol.
In that decade of the nineties the team won six leagues, and its role in Europe increased with the conquest of a Cup Winners' Cup and its first two continental Super Cups, although the second Champions League was resisted and all the culés remember the painful defeat by a landslide against to Milan in the 1994 final. Of course, in the signings the club barely made a mistake in all these years with the exception of the Brazilian Sonny Anderson in the 1997-1998 campaign. Although he won two leagues, it was not what was expected. He was supposed to be the replacement for Ronaldo, for whom Inter Milan paid his termination clause (4,000 million pesetas), but his performance was discreet and the signing of Kluivert in his second season led to his transfer to Olympique Lyonnais. .
Cruyff ended his time as coach at the end of the 1995-1996 season, closing a sporting cycle that in the offices lasted until the 1999-2000 campaign, the last of Núñez in the presidency and of Gil Aluja in the economic commission, since that the creator of the algorithm that helped the club grow by combining sporting and economic interests refused to continue under the presidency of Joan Gaspart. A cycle that was marked both by the 4-3-3 on the field and by the diffuse logic that drove the team without either the fans or the world of football in general being aware of it.
