FC Barcelona began with a Swiss man's newspaper ad in 1899
In October 1899 a Swiss newcomer named Hans Gamper placed a notice in a Barcelona sports paper saying he wanted to start a football club. Eleven men turned up to a gym the next month. The club they founded, still owned by its members, became a symbol of Catalan identity with the motto 'More than a club'.
The founders at the Gimnasio Solé on 29 November 1899 included Swiss, Catalan, German and English players, among them two Parsons brothers. Barça won its first trophy, the Copa Macaya, in 1902. Gamper, who took the Catalan name Joan, became president in 1908, moved the team into an 8,000-seat ground and ran a contest that produced the crest still worn, with minor changes, today. A membership drive pushed numbers above 20,000 by 1922, funding the new Les Corts stadium. Around this time the club also switched its official language from Castilian to Catalan.
Politics shadowed the club through the 20th century. In 1925, when fans jeered the Spanish royal anthem under Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, the ground was shut for six months and Gamper was forced out. Barcelona won the first Spanish league in 1929. In 1936 club president Josep Sunyol was killed by Falangist soldiers early in the Civil War, and after Catalonia was occupied, membership had shrunk to 3,486 and Catalan names and symbols were banned. A notorious 11–1 cup defeat to Real Madrid in 1943 cemented a rivalry freighted with meaning.
Success on the field has been enormous. Barcelona holds a record 82 domestic trophies and has won the Champions League five times. In 2009 it became the first Spanish club to win the league, cup and European title in one season, part of fourteen trophies in four years under Pep Guardiola. In 2010 three academy graduates, Lionel Messi, Andrés Iniesta and Xavi, filled the top three Ballon d'Or places.
It is one of three founding members never relegated from Spain's top flight, alongside Athletic Bilbao and Real Madrid, and is valued at $5.6 billion.
Source: FC Barcelona
