In the Council of Ministers held in the Pazo de Meirás on August 13, 1965, the urban modification of the Les Corts land was authorized. The decree definitively approved a building that the Blaugrana club had been requesting for years, as a more direct formula to wipe off the debt accumulated with the construction of the Camp Nou. This decision is insistently cited as an indisputable example of Franco's favoritism with FC Barcelona, but all the nuances surrounding the famous 1965 decree are usually ignored.
Les Cortes. The land that Gamper bought on February 8, 1922 for the construction of Les Corts did not have any special urban classification. As Manuel Tomàs points out in Les Corts i el Barça , “the club could perfectly have built flats there”. They became a green area in much later urban plans. Even in 1929 a part of the Barça land was expropriated by the City Council for the urbanization of the area.
The Camp Nou. On September 27, 1950, the board of directors of Agustí Montal Galobart signed the first option to purchase land in the area adjacent to the Maternity. (By the way, Kubala's official debut was still seven months away.) Then more farms were added to give the future stadium the maximum possible width. All those lands were located in an area that was widely suitable for building. There was even a plan that indicated where the streets that would connect the Diagonal with the Travessera de Les Corts would pass. One did it approximately through the central circle of the Camp Nou. A decree of the Ministry of the Interior of June 6, 1949 established the urbanization, expropriations and other details of that area "of the avenue of the Generalissimo".
The delay. The first stone of the Camp Nou was laid on March 28, 1954 and construction did not start until July 20, 1955. A delay that hurt Barcelona and that cannot be attributed solely to the club, but to shady external interests that never they are quoted To begin with, in February 1951, an official commission, with the national Urban Planning delegate, officials from the City Council and the president of the Spanish Federation, visited the area and advised against building the stadium in that area. Pressure began on the club to find another location, and years were wasted trying to exchange the land for the Melina tower, in the area where the Juan Carlos I hotel was later built. In October 1952 an agreement was even signed for this purpose, but was paralyzed because the approval of the university officials, also affected, was lacking. On this point, the Minister of Education, Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez, was adamant. He also harmed Barça the arrival of new technicians to the City Council who, instead of moving forward with the current file, wanted to start from scratch. The tension grew and in March 1953 Vice President Narcís de Carreras even threatened to denounce those responsible for slowing down the project to public opinion. Finally, on February 18, 1954, with Miró-Sans already in the presidency, they returned to the initial proposal, the Maternity area. Three years had been wasted.
The works. The construction phase was not easy either. The lack of iron and cement, and even electrical restrictions complicated the work and triggered the expected cost, which in a first estimate amounted to 66 million pesetas. (Let's pass by the facilities that Madrid had with the materials for the new Chamartín). In a report presented to the Blaugrana board of directors, it was noted that of the 1,500 daily bags of cement, barely 200 arrived. The club's indebtedness was stratospheric and the final cost stood at 288 million.
The counterpart. From the inauguration of the Camp Nou to the decree that allowed building in Les Corts, eight years passed during which the club survived suffocated by debts. In the municipal plenary session of August 4, 1962, the club's petition was approved, but then, as La Vanguardia recalled in August 1965, "the file went to Urbanism and had a very long process, in the course of which it was promulgated the law of December 2, 1963” by which “any modification made in green areas must be approved by the Council of Ministers”. Another obstacle. Finally, the club managed to redevelop 20,000 square meters of Les Corts, but it is never remembered that five more times, approximately one hundred thousand of the extensive Camp Nou area, lost their buildability.
The comparison. Barcelona's urban operation has not been, by far, the only one. In a "non-exhaustive" report by El País in 2006, it was pointed out that clubs such as Madrid, Valencia, Levante, Zaragoza, Sevilla, Betis, Murcia and Valladolid "maintain their signings thanks to brick." Espanyol reduced its debt with the reclassification of Sarrià. But the most scandalous case was that of Real Madrid with the reclassification of its Ciudad Deportiva, a 142,000-square-meter plot that the Madrid City Council had expropriated in 1960 so that the white club had its training area and for which it paid just 11 million pesetas with the commitment that it would always have a sporting use. It was the base of the Madrid of the galacticos.
