Who owns Barcelona? How 'socios' retain control while president Joan Laporta runs La Liga club

Barcelona’s place among football’s global elite is beyond dispute—third on the 2025 Forbes list of most valuable clubs, five-time European champions and a permanent fixture in every competition they enter—yet the question of who actually owns the Catalan giants rarely comes with a straightforward answer. There is no billionaire benefactor, no multinational conglomerate and no hedge-fund consortium calling the shots. Instead, more than 140,000 individual members, known simply as socios, collectively sit at the top of the organisational chart, making Barcelona one of the last major fan-owned operations in world sport.

The structure is elegantly simple. Anyone can apply for membership online or in person, pay the annual €225 fee and immediately gain access to the same ballot box that decides the club’s future. After 40 consecutive years—and provided the member has reached 65—the fee is waived. Membership numbers are non-transferable; the only exit is to resign or pass away. A 2023 census trimmed inactive records and pushed the roll down to 133,000, but a surge of 10,619 new socios in the 2024/25 campaign has restored the total to record levels.

Those socios exercise their power in two key ways. Every five years they vote in presidential and board elections—terms shortened from six by the incumbent Joan Laporta—and they also elect a 2,000-member Representative Assembly charged with approving budgets, authorising loans and, if necessary, disciplining the president. Laporta, currently in his second stint at the helm, must once again face that democratic test on 15 March after calling a mid-season referendum. He and his board will formally resign on 9 February, opening a six-week campaign window.

Day-to-day business falls to the president and his directors. Laporta first arrived in 2003, left in 2010 after overseeing Pep Guardiola’s appointment and the rise of Lionel Messi, spent a decade in Catalan politics, then returned in 2021 when financial chaos and public acrimony forced predecessor Josep Bartomeu to resign. Laporta’s second spell has been defined by efforts to steady a balance sheet that still shows liabilities of roughly €2.5 billion, according to club treasurer reports in January 2026. The colossal Camp Nou renovation project accounts for a sizeable portion of that debt, though officials believe increased match-day and commercial revenue from the modernised venue will eventually offset the burden.

Spanish legislation once threatened the fan-owned model. A 1992 statute required clubs to convert into public limited companies, but Barcelona and Real Madrid successfully argued sustained profitability, exploiting a loophole that preserved member control. Today Barcelona’s open-door policy contrasts sharply with Madrid’s capped and wait-listed membership. No sponsorship from existing socios is required, and the former three-year application queue was abolished under Laporta’s current mandate.

The result is a football institution that marries on-pitch glamour with grassroots democracy. While rival super-clubs answer to shareholders or private owners, Barcelona’s direction is ultimately set by teachers, taxi drivers, students and retirees scattered across Catalonia and the world, each with an equal vote. As Laporta fights for another term, the real power brokers—the socios—prepare to decide not only who sits in the presidential suite, but how the next chapter of one of football’s most storied names will be written.