Alberto Estevez/EPA, via Shutterstock
A group of F.C. Barcelona members that has spent months mobilizing, planning and plotting to force out the club’s unpopular president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, is using the soccer team’s latest crisis to begin an official campaign to force a change in leadership.
The effort’s biggest opponent is not Bartomeu, though, but rather a ticking clock, restrictions brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and the club’s own byzantine rules: To force a no-confidence vote in the board, the organizers first must collect the handwritten signatures of portion of the club’s 140,000 members who are eligible to vote — about 16,500 people.