Barça News
Barcelona presidential candidate is trying to ‘rig’ polls
In a rather interesting turn of events, one of Barcelona’s three presidential candidates, Toni Freixa, is trying to rig polls on social media.
In a poll conducted by journalist Gerard Romero on Twitter, he asked his followers who they would vote for in the upcoming elections if they were socios. The results revealed a very strange set of result after a few hours of the poll being posted.
Joan Laporta, former club president, is the clear frontrunner to take over the presidency of Barcelona once again. Soon after Romero’s poll was posted, over 8000 votes were counted and 88% of them were in favour of Laporta, as was expected.
Toni Freixa, who is 6% behind even Victor Font initially, somehow ended the poll with the highest number of votes. This has led to a ton of suspicion on social media, which is fairly well founded.
Toni Freixa has reportedly been using automated bots to bump up numbers in online polls. Another poll that was conducted earlier in February, asking which candidate was the fans’ favourite, saw similar results. A large number of votes for Freixa suddenly piled up, leading to outrage among fans.
READ: Joan Laporta and Victor Font lock horns in Barcelona presidential debate
Even after Joan Laporta, Victor Font seems to have plenty more backing amongst the Barcelona fans. Freixa is clearly the least favourite candidate and it seems so even among the actual socios. He just barely made the cut for candidacy after nearly falling short of the required number of signatures.
One thing is for certain though, that rigging results of polls on social media is definitely not going to help Toni Freixa win the elections.
Poor
Good
Excellent
In a conference held by ADEA Forum (Association of managers and executives of Aragon) in Zaragoza, Javier Tebas spoke on a wide range of topics surrounding La Liga.
Mostly, the La Liga president spoke regarding the league’s bounce back from the pandemic and some potential plans for the league to restore public crowds. He also discussed the losses incurred, the summer transfers, among other things.
The Condition of La Liga
Tebas started the conference by claiming that the situation for the Spanish league is comparatively better than other leagues.
Speaking on this, he said, “The situation is worrying, but not so much. I think that of this pandemic the Spanish League is the one that is going to turn out less badly compared to the others.”
He then spoke about the losses incurred in Spanish football, with the net loss amounting to €1 billion by the 30th of September.
On the losses, Tebas said, “Of this billion, 750 have been financed by banks or investment funds, the latter the majority based in London, and the rest have been done by the clubs pulling their cash.”
Additionally, he mentioned that it was big clubs that were affected stronger than the smaller clubs, due to the huge loss of income from the lack of crowds, among other profitable economic activities that clubs such as Real Madrid and Barcelona enjoy above others.
A return for crowds to stadiums
When speaking on a return of crowds to stadiums, the La Liga chief seemed tremendously confident in their ability to host crowds as early as tomorrow. He claimed that they would have to run at between 20% to 30% capacity; nonetheless, the Spaniard was confident that teams would be more than capable of hosting crowds very soon.
Speaking on the same, he said, “There is a working group for the return [of fans] to the stadiums. I hope that in the last league games we can see the public in a proportional amount.”
Upcoming transfer window
Speaking on the summer transfer window, the president claimed that there will indeed be a lower amount of transfers as there were in the previous window. Tebas said, “They have already been lower in winter. There may be occasional and exceptional operations, but globally it will decrease. There will be exchanges of players. It’s going to be lower than last year.”
Accordingly, clubs are going to have to dig into their academy reserves more and more as the global and financial situations amend over time.