Joan Laporta’s smile was hard to miss. Staring down from a vast digital billboard last month, the grinning image of the president of the Spanish soccer giant F.C. Barcelona covered almost an entire side of the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas.
The billboard scrolled through other images — there was one of a handful of Barcelona’s players, and another of its coach, Xavi Hernández — but soon enough it was back to Laporta. And it was that sight, a beaming president front and center in the gambling capital of the world, that was perhaps the best symbolism of the financial mess in which Barcelona currently finds itself, and of the boundless confidence of the man who says he has a plan to fix it.