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Joan Laporta i Estruch (; born 29 June 1962) is a Spanish businessman, politician, and current president of FC Barcelona.
Laporta is a lawyer (he graduated from the University of Barcelona) with his own firm, Laporta & Arbós, which has a number of notable Catalan firms as clients. He served as an MP in the Parliament of Catalonia between 2010 and 2012.
During his first tenure as president of Barcelona, they set a new record for trophies won in a 12-month period, winning six in 2009. After departing in 2010, he was re-elected as club president in 2021.
During Laporta's reign as club president, the sports sections of Barcelona have won over 101 official trophies as of 2025.
Laporta's first season (2003–04) as president would prove to be a watershed for the club, but not without initial instability. The club situation was one of bitter unhappiness and disappointment amongst both fans and players after the club failed to meet their own standards to match Real Madrid's success in the early 2000s, having not won trophies since 1999.
Laporta also had to spur his board to foster creative business ideas to raise revenue, and in recent years, that new style of management eventually succeeded in turning around the fortunes of the club with the team spectacularly returning to form and finishing second after being at the bottom of the table in 2003–04, and then finally managing to win La Liga titles both in 2004–05 and in 2005–06. During this period, the inherited massive financial debt started to be cut down, and only two players remained from the original team that did not win a major title in six years, with players like Deco, Samuel Eto'o and Edmílson as the new starlets, around Ronaldinho and a core of home-grown players like Carles Puyol, Xavi, Andrés Iniesta, Víctor Valdés and Oleguer Presas. The club finally won the UEFA Champions League on 17 May 2006, only their second time in history, as well as that year's Liga championship.
Barcelona had a long history of avoiding shirt sponsors. In 2006, Barcelona announced a five-year agreement with UNICEF, where the club would donate €1.5 million and the UNICEF logo would feature on their shirts. After Laporta left as president, the club signed shirt sponsorships with Qatar Foundation and later Qatar Airways, which he criticised. Laporta hace suyos los éxitos de Sandro Rosell - El Mundo / Europa Press, 16 June 2011
The elections were to be held on 3 September 2006, but they turned out to be unnecessary as on 22 August, Barcelona confirmed Laporta's presidency for another four years after no other would-be candidate received the 1,804 signatures required to stand for the elections.
Following the results, it was speculated that Laporta would resign due to pressure from fellow directors. This would have resulted in then vice-president Albert Vicens taking over for Laporta, with Ferran Soriano replacing Vicens as the main vice-president. These rumours, however, were quickly dismissed by Laporta. On 10 July 2008, 8 of the 17 board members – vice-presidents Albert Vicens, Ferran Soriano and Marc Ingla, and directors Evarist Murtra, Toni Rovira, Xavier Cambra, Clàudia Vives-Fierro and Josep Lluís Vilaseca – resigned following Laporta's confirmation that he will stay on as president of the club despite the opinion of the members. In a press statement, they revealed that they resigned due to "discrepancies in the way to act after the result of the motion".
Laporta has long held ambitions to enter Catalan politics after leaving office as president of FC Barcelona. He has in the past been outspoken about his political affiliations: he supports Catalan independence from Spain. FC Barcelona is seen by many as a symbol of Catalonia, a generally accepted fact which Laporta often emphasizes but has been criticized by those who think that Barça should remain neutral from a political standpoint.
Following the end of his second term as president, Laporta formed the independence-seeking political party Democràcia Catalana (Catalan Democracy). In the summer of 2010, Laporta's party merged with other extra-parliamentary pro-independence parties and grassroots movements into a political platform called Catalan Solidarity for Independence. Laporta was elected its president.
In the Catalan elections of 28 November 2010, the new party managed to win four seats in the 135-member Catalan Parliament, making it the sixth largest party out of seven. Laporta was elected in the Barcelona Province constituency.
In 2011, Laporta stepped down as president of the Catalan Solidarity for Independence and left the party.
In October 2005, he faced a scandal when his brother-in-law and member of the board of directors in charge of security, Alejandro Echevarría, was revealed to be a member of the Francisco Franco Foundation. After several denials by Echevarría and Laporta, contested by documents shown by a former member of the board of directors, Laporta was finally forced to accept Echevarría's resignation. Echevarría continued, however, to be close to the club and he organized the security during the celebrations of the 2005–06 La Liga championship.
Laporta's own political history added to the complications surrounding the Echevarría scandal, as his politics are diametrically opposed to those implied by Echevarría's membership of the Francisco Franco Foundation. Laporta is a self-described Catalan nationalist and has been identified on several occasions as supporting the independence of Catalonia from Spain. In the early 1990s, he and fellow Catalan politicians Pilar Rahola and Ángel Colom founded the now-defunct Partit per la independencia, which supported Catalan separatism. He was also an active participant at the controversial Frankfurt Book Fair of 2007, at which Catalan language and culture were the special featured invitees, but not including other Catalonia-based authors who wrote in other languages, such as Spanish. At the fair, Laporta stated that he "hopes that FC Barcelona continues to be a tool to promote the Catalan language and culture" and to the contrary, he would feel obligated "to create the Catalan Republic of Barcelona".
Another criticism Joan Laporta faced was coming back to his presidential chair in 2021 for FC Barcelona, which already had big financial issues and its best football player Lionel Messi on the verge of leaving, with promises to turn the situation around and persuade Messi to stay. He failed the promise, Messi left for another club making some fans angry and upset. Messi's exit from Barcelona led to Jaume Llopis, a former member of the Espai Barça Commission, to resign from his post stating that the club and the president did not do their all to keep the Argentine at the club.[3]
Laporta declined the request, stating: "After waiting here since nine o'clock in the morning, I believe I have every right to testify in Catalan, which is my own language and that of my country."
Following Laporta’s refusal, magistrate Antonio Morales offered him the possibility of returning to testify at another session with the presence of an interpreter. Laporta considered it disrespectful that the provision of an interpreter had not been arranged from the outset.
The incident sparked public debate about language rights and the use of Catalan in judicial settings.
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